The May 21 Bancroft Roundtable will explore the significance of a series of company towns and industrial suburbs just east of San Francisco Bay built between 1880 and 1940.
Peter Ekman, Bancroft Library Study Award winner and a doctoral candidate in Geography at UC Berkeley, will lead the discussion of this month’s topic, The World’s Best Working Climate: Modeling Industrial Suburbs on the Edge of San Francisco Bay. Drawing on visual materials and numerous manuscript collections at the Bancroft, Eckman will discuss how an unfashionable, unplanned “middle landscape” came, over time, to serve as a kind of laboratory for new, imitable models of social and spatial order. Ekman will place these experiments within a prehistory of the post-war suburb and explore their afterlives amid decades of disinvestment.
What: Bancroft Roundtable on the World’s Best Working Climate
Where: Lewis-Latimer Room of the Faculty Club
When: Noon on May 21, 2015