Inventing Autopia: Dreams and Visions of the Modern Metropolis in Jazz Age Los Angeles. By Jeremiah B. C. Axelrod. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. xii, 401 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 978-0-520-25284-4. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-520-25285-1.)

Abstract

Inventing Autopia sets out to illuminate how Los Angeles residents experienced and interpreted their city's transition from a traditional downtown-centered city to a sprawling multicentered metropolis. Jeremiah B. C. Axelrod focuses on the manifold visions that Los Angeles urban planners and business leaders developed for the city's transformation as it grew voraciously during the 1920s. In that single decade the city's population leapt from some 500,000 residents to nearly 1.25 million, moving from being the tenth largest city in the country to the fifth largest. Committed to not re-creating the kind of congested vertical city that New York and Chicago had made famous, Angelenos struggled to understand the newfangled shape of their city and convert their hopeful visions of its future into reality. Their struggle over what Axelrod deems a “crisis in urban legibility” lies at the heart of his study (p. 11). Much of Axelrod's interest rests on the plans that the city's business and planning leaders developed amid the crisis. Chapters are devoted to a 1924 Major Traffic Street Plan, a set of 1926 referenda to allow elevated transit tracks and new commercial zoning, and a 1930 plan (developed by the sons of Frederick Olmsted) for a network of scenic parks and parkways. Axelrod dissects the proposals, scrutinizing the language and style of each, and plots the degree to which they either expressed business leaders' lingering hopes for an East Coast-style city organized around a central business district or reflected local planners' aspirations for a “garden city” made up of multiple, interdependent, but relatively freestanding communities.