Event: Bancroft Roundtable: “‘The World’s Best Working Climate’: Modeling Industrial Suburbs on the Edge of San Francisco Bay.”

The last Bancroft Roundtable of the spring semester will take place in the Lewis-Latimer Room of The Faculty Club at noon on Thursday, May 21. Peter Ekman, Bancroft Library Study Award recipient and doctoral candidate in geography at UC Berkeley, will present “‘The World’s Best Working Climate’: Modeling Industrial Suburbs on the Edge of San Francisco Bay.”

Between 1880 and 1940, urban manufacturers, planners, and property developers configured a series of company towns and industrial suburbs just east of San Francisco Bay, stretching from Richmond to Antioch on the shores of the Carquinez Strait. Drawing on visual materials and numerous manuscript collections at the Bancroft, Peter Ekman will discuss how this unfashionable, ostensibly unplanned “middle landscape” came, over time, to serve as a kind of laboratory for new, imitable models of social and spatial order. He will place these experiments within a prehistory, intellectual and material-cultural, of the postwar suburb, and explore their afterlives amid decades of disinvestment.

We hope to see you there.

Crystal Miles, Kathi Neal, and Baiba Strads
Bancroft Library Staff