Human geographers need to consider the implications of this situation. Finally, Hannahis certainly right about comparative opportunities, and some will say that his explicitlytheoretical focus brings them more clearly into focus. This book will elicit a range ofresponses. I doubt that it points towards a more enthusiastically received historicalgeography, but it tackles many complex issues well, and reveals a good deal about thecontemporary challenge, especially for the young and thoughtful, of writing historicalgeography.

University of British Columbia COLE HARRIS

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0519

GREG HISE and WILLIAM DEVERELL, Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted±BartholomewPlan for the Los Angeles Region (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000.Pp. vii� 314. $17.95 paperback)

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Eden by Design, according to the authors, is a study of urban archaeology. The heart ofthe book is a reproduction of the 1930 planning document Parks, Playgrounds, andBeaches for the Los Angeles Region created by the landscape architecture ®rms ofOlmsted Brothers and Bartholomew and Associates. This remarkable 178-page regionalplan (which was never put into place) has languished in the archives since its publication;in this book, Hise and Deverell present it to a wider audience for the ®rst time. Thereproduction of the planning document is sandwiched between a lengthy introductionand an extended interview with landscape architect Laurie Olin (conducted by theauthors) that serves as an afterword. The book leads readers through a reconstruction ofthe southern California past. The authors invite us to revisit the social conditions that ledto the inception of the Olmsted±Bartholomew plan. They challenge us to imagine a LosAngeles that never was. They take us along in search of any legacy of the plan that mightbe recognizable in the urban landscape of Los Angeles today. They ask us to ponder thepolitical state of affairs that caused the plan to be scuttled and led, ultimately, to the LosAngeles that is. The Olmsted±Bartholomew plan is an intriguing document. On one level,its collection of photographs and thematic maps provides an invaluable window into theactual urban geography of the region in the late 1920s. On another level, its compre-hensive and con®dent recommendations for an integrated system of public beaches, cityparks, regional preserves, parkways, and ridge top drives provide a grand vision of whatsort of place Los Angeles might have become had this framework been established beforethe explosive growth of the post-war era. The format of the plan will be familiar tostudents of the history of planning and landscape architecture. It follows the `surveybefore plan approach', presenting a thorough assessment of the region's recreationalneeds and potential growth problems before moving on to a detailed description of anexpanded regional park and transportation system complete with suggestions forinstitutional arrangements to govern park management and ®nance. The content ofthe plan will also be familiar. Though adapted to the broad scale of southern California,its essential features are drawn from a template established in the ambitious progressive-era urban landscape plans enacted in such cities as Boston, Brooklyn, and Kansas City.

Many questions arise from reading this long-neglected document. The most obviousemerge from the exercise of puzzling through how this plan would have changed therelationship between the city and its natural environment in southern California. Butthere are other important questions. Who initiated this planning process, and for whatreasons? Why was the plan never acted upon? And, why did this planning effort notcrystallize until the late 1920s, when other US cities were attempting to address urban

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problems through landscape design decades earlier? Hise and Deverell provide anoverview of the social and political context of early twentieth century Los Angeles in theirexcellent introduction, giving us answers to these questions. Here, we learn that the planemerged through a series of ironic circumstances. In fact, the Olmsted ®rm wasapproached with the idea of producing a parks plan for the city in 1908, but municipalleaders decided they could not afford the study because of the large amount of moneyalready committed to building the Los Angeles aqueductÐthe very thing that literallyopened the ¯oodgates of growth over the next two decades and made the need for aregional plan all the more pressing. When the idea of regional planning was revisited inthe face of rapid change in the 1920s, it was not led by the city but by the LA Chamber ofCommerce. The Chamber, at the behest of ®lm star Mary Pickford, formed the CitizensCommittee (a group of concerned, wealthy Angelenos) to engage the Olmsted andBartholomew ®rms. How perfectly symmetrical: it was a personmade rich and famous byearly Hollywoodmovie makingÐthe industry that projected a romantic and paradisaicalgeographical image of Los Angeles to the world and was thereby responsible for a greatdeal of migration to the regionÐthat came to spearhead the attempt to contain growthand assert an Elysian order on the urban landscape.While the authors touch on the socialbeliefs that led Pickford and other elites to embrace the planning process, the focus oftheir discussion is the LA Chamber of Commerce. The Chamber, through its creation ofthe Citizens Committee, initiated the Olmsted±Bartholomew plan; but they alsoultimately killed the plan and suppressed its distribution. Hise and Deverell explainthis about-face through an examination of the minutes of long-ago Chamber meetings,providing a glimpse into the political landscape of late-1920s LA. Their interpretationfocuses on the shifting coalitions between Chamber members and other actors within thebusiness-dominated local `̀ oligarchy''. This is an insightful discussion of how poweroperated within the city, and is well grounded in the literature on the political economy ofsouthern California. Yet, while the minutes reveal the Chamber's concerns about boththe power of an autonomous parks district and increased taxation, one is still leftwondering why this local oligarchy ultimately opposed the plan. After all, grand urbandesign of this sort succeeded in other American cities precisely because public investmentin the landscape most often dovetailed with the needs of property developers andboosters. Why did this formula not work in LA?Maybe it was bad timingÐthe plan wasproposed at the outset of the Great Depression. Perhaps, as Laurie Olin claims, parts ofthe plan were ``beyond the ken of the folks in Los Angeles'' (p. 296). I'm not so sure; itseems just as likely that some faction of the local business oligarchy had a strong grasp ofthe implications of the plan and opposed it for carefully considered reasons. But withoutsome knowledge of the decision-making conversations that took place apart from theof®cial record of the Chamber, we can only speculate. So, just as reading this bookdemands an act of imagination to ®ll in what the region would have looked like with theOlmsted±Bartholomew plan in place, it also demands an act of imagination to ®ll in thepolitical struggle that kept the plan from being realized. In any event, all that remainstoday are faint echoes of the plan, little bits and pieces that cannot help but seem punyand inconsequential by comparison to the original vision. In closing, the authors statethat `̀ it is too simplistic to rehearse the standard narrative of Los Angeles as Eden lost''(p. 55), yet there is an undertone of sadness, even tragedy, to the introduction andafterword. Surprisingly, it is not LA's missed opportunity that is lamented; rather it is thefailure of the Olmsted±Bartholomew plan on its own terms. The plan put the automobileat the centre of a design based in nineteenth century landscape sensibilities, but failed tosee the contradictions of this combination. As Olin states, ``there is a vision of touringthrough a landscape paradise implied in this report that, of course, was amirage that keptreceding from us all as we tried to approach it'' (p. 293). Poised at the end of an era inlandscape architecture, the Olmsted and Bartholomew ®rms simply believed too much intheir vision of regional landscape design. Eden by Design is a unique and engaging book

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that offers an important contribution to geography, urban studies, and planning. Itshould be of great interest to a broad range of historical geographers.

University of Colorado at Denver BRIAN PAGE

doi:10.1006/jhge.2002.0520

STEPHANIE S. PINCETL, Transforming California: A Political History of Land Use andDevelopment (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Pp. xix� 372.$45.00 hardback)

This book argues compellingly that California served as the nursery for a certain vision ofpolitical liberalism. The initiative, referendum, and recall promised to give individualsgreater control over government, more responsibility for its direction. But in spite of itshigh-minded posture and claims to democratic process, progressive reform isolatedpeople from their state and local elected of®cials. It created a class of expert advisors andlobbyists who have eroded the sense of possibility and the in¯uence of community in stategovernment. Down went the give-and-take of parties; up went the managerial regime ofbureaucrats. Boards made up of corporate leaders and local politicos underminedthe authority of civil servants and widened the distance between administration andthe electorate. This is why, writes Pincetl, that even though the state is beset with issuesof the greatest importance to its populace, California rates low in citizen participation.This alone would be the argument of an important book, but Pincetl combines it withanother dimension, best stated in the subtitle: A Political History of Land Use andDevelopment. Key examples of the argument are taken from land use history, so thatwell-known controversies of wilderness preservation and water allocation are hereconsidered as evidence of a new and less democratically responsive system in the making.There is no question about the importance of land use to a history of politics inCalifornia. To discuss governmental conservation separately from the con¯icts thatalways attended it would be to participate in the Progressive's own ®ction that policy inthe public interest is beyond politics. A number of recent books have revealed how peopleresisted hunting regulations and the imposition of national parks and forests in order tomaintain traditional land uses and local control. Yet the combination of land use andpolitical reform is also a source of dif®culty inTransforming California. It is not clear howthe subject of land use furthers the central argument. California's environment furnishesevery example, but the author never closes the circle that would link the environment tothe development of progressive governance. In other words, Pincetl could havesubstituted any other subject for `land use' (labour, industry and education) andattached it to the core argument about political institutions.

The chapter on Jerry Brown's career as governor during the 1970s best ful®lls thepromise of the book. Here Pincetl details how Brown and the environmentalists heappointed became embroiled in one controversy after another, as when a judge ruled in1975 that timber harvesting was subject to regulation by the California EnvironmentalQuality Act. The struggle over who would regulate private forest practices on land thatincluded scarce redwoods combined many of the elements of previous chapters: a boardof experts, public±private partnerships, and rigidity in the face of citizen protest. As itturned out, the Brown administration `̀ acted on its own with no public input, nolegislative outreach . . . and most of all, no apparent respect for the dilemmas facingresidents'' (p. 205). And yet Brown's failures may have had more to do with his own styleof leadership (and his inexperience) than with the lingering effects of progressivegovernment in the 1970s. Here and elsewhere in the book, the central argument is not