Inventing Autopia: Dreams and Visions of the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles (review)

Before Mike Davis's City of Quartz (1990) reminded readers how crucial Los Angeles was to our understanding of the modern global metropolis, the "land of sunshine" was one of the most understudied regions in America. Yes, the ubiquitous topics that are emblematic of the city have their historians. Yet a surfeit of works examining the ribbons of freeways—one of the region's landmarks—is still elusive. And even though Jeremiah Axelrod's title and the parkway on the cover suggest that a significant examination of freeways will occur in Inventing Autopia, it never does. What Axelrod does cover, however, is how Los Angeles committed itself to a freeway future as far back as the 1920s; decades before the Red Cars of the Pacific Electric were halted, freeways were already LA's future.

Axelrod accomplishes this by examining how 1920s planners viewed LA's urban environments, and how their progressive expertise allowed them to reconstruct the city into their own imaged archetypes. In essence, this is a story of the world's truly oldest profession, the envisioning and planning of a city. Because Jazz Age Los Angeles suffered from what Axelrod calls a "crisis in urban legibility" (p. 11), it was the new technologically advanced school of urban planning that restructured the city into a methodical and well-planned metropolis incorporating progressive measures of wellness and social healing, seeing the city in the same manner doctors examine, then cure, a patient.

Axelrod skillfully weaves social, planning, and cultural history collectively so that many readers will not be able to tell where one method ends and another begins. Even so, Inventing Autopia often reads like a greatest hits of urban planning, covering classic topics like sprawl and the myth of LA as an unplanned city (which Axelrod debunks). Axelrod spends ample time elucidating the archbishop of urban planning, Ebenezer Howard. Howard's 1898 Garden Cities promoted "social familiarity and community interaction" (p. 50), creating walkable human-scale cities that are a stark contrast to most major boroughs. His web of communities connected to industrial centers so that residents could walk to work. In Los Angeles, however, efforts to implement Howard's ideologies ran afoul of political realities that ultimately left the city with the stigma of being an unplanned "crabgrass frontier."

Much of what Axelrod covers should be familiar to readers with a background in LA planning history. For example, his examination of the rise of suburban retail along Wilshire Boulevard can also be found in Richard Longstreth's City Center to Regional Mall (1998), in which Longstreth examines the decentralization of retail centers from LA's urban core that helped spawn the ubiquitous sprawl. Still, Axelrod's inclusion of the 1926 referendum adds a level of understanding and interest to this well-known story. In Los Angeles and the Automobile (1987), Scott Bottles not only covers the same "Jazz Age" era, but also addresses downtown LA's infamous traffic and controversial parking ban. But Axelrod is able to enhance the historiography by focusing on anti-parking-ban leader Clara Kimball, a prominent actress who "just happened to have a major motion picture opening the weekend of the parking ban parade" (p. 67). One of Axelrod's most memorable contributions is his examination of the 1930 Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches report, which many historians have touted as a "green" and equitable planning solution. Axelrod critiques much of the praise and questions whether much benefit would have resulted from its implementation.

Several changes could have improved Axelrod's book. First, he may have stretched his claim that freeways are a product of 1920s planning, since it was engineers, not planners, who designed California's freeways, and a deeper examination of freeways reveals that their acceptance was shortlived. Second, by Axelrod's own design, his work is limited to Los Angeles in the 1920s. But what Inventing Autopia does...