Peter Ekman, PhD alum and current faculty member at USC's School of Architecture, has published his first book. Timing the Future Metropolis is a hemispheric intellectual history of planning, urbanism, design, and social science. It reconstructs the midcentury intellectual network that gave rise to the interdisciplinary field of urban studies — at a time when geography departments were closing across the U.S. — and other configurations of “organized research” on urban form and life devised to conceptualize the American city’s ostensible crisis and renewal. It discusses numerous cities but is localized mainly on this country's Eastern Seaboard (chiefly Boston and New York) and in South America (chiefly Ciudad Guayana, Venezuela). The book ultimately compels a broader reflection on temporality in urban planning, rethinking how we might imagine cities yet to come — and the consequences of deciding not to.
During his time with UC Berkeley Geography, Ekman worked closely with the late Paul Groth (his dissertation chair) and Jake Kosek.
Timing the Future Metropolis, published by Cornell University Press, comes out November 15. Learn more about the book and Ekman here.