Elsa Devienne’s Sand Rush is a welcome addition to an important strand of literature that explores the complicated relationship between urban planning and environmental advocacy. Taking as its setting 75 miles of Los Angeles County shoreline – from Malibu in the north to the Palos Verdes Peninsula in the south – the book presents a series of well-researched and absorbing accounts of beach development. In framing the provision of public beaches as essential to Los Angeles’ transformation into a great coastal metropolis, it skilfully reconsiders the geographical scope of urban renewal. In doing so, it emphasizes the enduring popularity of the seaside, even as other leisure spaces declined.

Devienne’s argument revolves around the actions of what she refers to as the LA ‘beach lobby’, a grouping of civic organizations, city officials and concerned professionals that emerged in the late 1920s with the shared ambition of preserving the sands and expanding access to beaches across southern California. In constructing a nuanced reading of early preservation groups, such as the California Beaches Association and Shoreline Planning Association, she places their members, drawn from local elites and emerging subfields like coastal engineering and shoreline planning, at the centre of the debate. The motivations that guided the lobby’s initial attempts to tackle problems like erosion and pollution, Devienne notes, resist easy categorization, as they were apparently driven equally by the promise of tourist dollars and a recognition of the threats to nature from unchecked regional growth. In this context, the text’s refusal to treat different phases of advocacy as entirely unrelated produces an astute history that looks to the contributions of figures who, on the surface, might be considered unlikely activists. The overarching result is that the trajectories of the environmental and planning movements in California are brought into a close and compelling dialogue.

Making this effort to establish the motivations of the first phase of beach boosters pays dividends when, later in the chronology, more familiar modernizing impulses become dominant. Indeed, public beaches couldn’t avoid being pulled into a series of aggressive ‘clean-up’ programmes that sought to indiscriminately clear away ‘blight’ and raise property values after World War II. On the coastline, real estate development proceeded in line with the new principles of suburban planning, while decision-makers, embracing the period’s rigid ideas about respectability, preferred wide-open spaces and ample parking lots over old-fashioned amusement zones.

As well as an introduction and epilogue Sand Rush has seven chapters, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the process of ‘beach renewal’ and its consequences for the physical and social environment of Los Angeles. The story begins with a detailed account of the city’s opening phase of coastal development and a discussion of the regulatory order that restricted access to beach recreation from 1900 to the 1940s. Additional chapters address the emergence of the organized beach lobby in the 1930s and 1940s, beach development in the post-war ‘suburban age’ and representations of the beach body. They also include attempts by city officials to erase countercultural communities like Muscle Beach and Crystal Beach from the map, through a variety of strategies, including seizure by eminent domain and stringent night closure ordinances.

In the final section, attention shifts to the emergence of new activist groups who, from the mid-1960s, found themselves increasingly at odds with an establishment that had failed to grasp the level of scepticism Angelinos held towards the pace of coastal development. The backlash to beach renewal was led by residents’ organizations like the Santa Monica Save the Beach Association for whom the provision of new facilities and freeways was secondary to a forthright preservationist agenda. The consensus behind beach modernization broke down, as engineers and council members looked to increasingly ambitious proposals, culminating in John Drescher’s 1961 Santa Monica Causeway scheme. Located 4,000ft out in the bay, the envisaged six-mile-long string of artificial islands would have run parallel to the coast all the way from Santa Monica Beach to Malibu, easing pressure on the Pacific Coast Highway and providing an additional 2.5 million square feet of public amenity. In a broader political context, which featured significant homeowner unrest as well as rising alertness to the loss of ‘untouched’ nature close to home, the project hit the buffers. The coastal protection movement had decoupled itself from local government, triggering fundamental changes in state-level environmental policies.

Devienne’s approach illuminates how a major coastal city managed public access to recreation, while providing an impressively rich account of localized environmental movements. Urban historians will appreciate the central argument that planning and development professionals were important players, for good or ill, in the narrative. In addition to relating the previously little-discussed growth of LA’s Westside, Sand Rush is a rousing call to action in the face of rising sea levels. More than this, it is a reminder of the lasting social benefits that long-sighted shoreline protection can bring about.