How can we explain Los Angeles? Other US cities that expanded rapidly in the twentieth century did so vertically, at least at their core. Yet for most of that century, Los Angeles lacked a skyscraper centre, and for some it has seemed to lack a centre of any kind. Its expansion was horizontal, an apparently unplanned sprawl. Yet for Jeremiah Axelrod, ‘contrary to conventional wisdom, Greater Los Angeles's urban form was planned; in fact, it was overdetermined by plans’ (p. 312). In rejecting the model of New York and Chicago, in the 1920s some Angelenos planners looked instead to Ebenezer Howard's ideal of the ‘Garden City’, while Los Angeles planning director Gordon Whitnall set out another dream, located between ‘garden city autarky and anarchic sprawl’ (p. 321). The development away from downtown was not a consequence of a lack of planning but of a clash between competing plans and visions, and often a failure to articulate particular ideals and to adapt to the changing urban, suburban and post-suburban environment.

In making this case, Axelrod unearths some fascinating material on the battles fought over the city's development and the means of passing through it, from Hollywood star Clara Kimball Young's campaign against the downtown parking ban of 1920 to the 1926 ballot on proposals to develop Union Station, lift zoning restrictions on portions of Wilshire Boulevard and waive the city's height limit for the new city hall. He illustrates how Los Angeles might have developed differently, while remaining sceptical of the claims that have been made for the radical nature of the unrealized Olmsted Brothers proposal of 1930: Parks, Playgrounds, and Beaches for the Los Angeles Region. His ambitions extend beyond detailing planning debates and decisions taken and avoided within the Los Angeles region in the 1920s. In examining ‘the relationships between imagination and place’ (p. 1), he draws on urban theory but also on wider debates concerning modernity and visual culture, and his discussion ranges from Los Angeles Times headlines to Ralph Ellison's account of New York in Invisible Man.

This is a substantial work, clearly based on wide-ranging research, that itself extends far beyond its centre. The chapter on ‘Imagining the metropolis in a modern age’ examines futuristic images of Chicago and New York, which is useful as a comparison but leaves a curious imbalance: this is a book on Los Angeles which includes a discussion of a number of books, films and artworks that imagine the city, but mostly not Los Angeles. It draws upon film studies, but that variety in which actual films seem less important than references to ‘suture’ and Laura Mulvey on ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’ (credited in the notes to an anthology apparently published two years before the original first appeared). The link between the view through the car windscreen and the cinema spectator's gaze at least provides a variation of the more common connection between watching films and the train journey or fairground ride; whether it works beyond the General Motors World's Fair Futurama exhibit is another question. Axelrod is clearly justified in giving a central role to the car in the jazz age development of Los Angeles. However, for a book titled Inventing Autopia there is surprisingly little on the appeal of the automobile beyond the fact that it meant avoiding streetcar travel. There is one mention of Rayner Banham, but no more direct reference to the autopia of Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies than to Disneyland's Autopia. The significance of ‘jazz age Los Angeles’ is similarly under-developed; it remains unclear whether this is simply a way of saying ‘1920s Los Angeles’ or whether a case is being made for a link between urban planning policy and the city's cultural innovation and energy.

The book's cover shows a photograph of the 1940 opening of the Arroyo Seco Parkway, a curious choice for a study of ‘efforts to read greater Los Angeles in the 1920s’ (p. 2); when Axelrod discusses the photograph in his Epilogue he notes that the Parkway was ‘quietly redesigned as a freeway’ (p. 302), and, in emphasizing speed rather than the surrounding landscape, turned its back on the Garden City ideals of 1920s planners. The value of Inventing Autopia lies in its examination of the debates and plans that preceded the Los Angeles freeway. It details the clash between differing urban ideals in a key decade in the city's history, and as such provides an important account of planners’ ideals, achievements and failures. A book-length study of the 1920s invention of autopia, or autogeddon, remains to be written.