| This is a study of the community building process and urban expansion. My specific concern is the decisive mid-twentieth-century shift from the center-dominated industrial city to a decentralized urban region. I began my analysis of this transformation by studying Los Angeles homebuilders and their spatial logic. This pointed to industry and led to my thesis, which is, that New Deal housing policy designed to extend home ownership to the working-classes intersected with the wartime deconcentration of industry to accelerate an emerging pattern of satellite metropolitan development. And, contrary to the received suburban history, community builders actively maintained a close spatial relationship between housing and the workplace during this critical period.; The urban region was constructed one project at a time. To uncover its roots I trace the innovations in land development and financing, the standardization of neighborhood and house design, and the rationalization of building practice essential for mass-housing. While the implications of this new spatial and social order were national in scope, I chose California as the indicator state. Here New Deal agencies and private builders first implemented many elements of modern community housing. The Farm Security Administration developed rural new towns and refined, on the ground, the planning principles and housing research of the preceding two decades. Their attention to comprehensive planning, low-cost construction systems, and labor processes prefigured many of the strategies subsequently adopted by speculative homebuilders.; Then, beginning in the late 1930s, Los Angeles' expanding economy and the rise in lower-skilled manufacturing employment provided an unparalleled opportunity for community builders to advance the ideals and practices formulated during the interwar period. The satellite communities they constructed formed the basis for a regional city, a new configuration that eclipsed the spatial order of the industrial city. The regional city premiered in Los Angeles, advanced to a new level during the war, and developed in other metropolitan areas in the postwar era. In short, my focus is on housing and homebuilding, their relationship to industry, and the role of the workplace-residence link in the creation of the fully urbanized region. |
