Peter Ekman

Ph.D., University of California, Berkeley, 2016

A.B., Harvard College, 2007

urban, cultural, and historical geography; landscape studies; American and transnational intellectual histories of planning and urbanism; urban, suburban, and regional form; social and geographic thought; histories of knowledge, science, and expertise; materiality and material culture; temporality and historiography; ruins and ruination

E-mail: psrekman@berkeley.edu

Website: psre.us

Peter Ekman is a cultural and historical geographer of urban America. At Berkeley, he has offered four courses: "American Landscapes: History, Geography, and the Built Environment since 1500" (Geography 160), "Walkers in the City: Landscape, Mobility, and Everyday Life" (Geography 170), "Field Study of Buildings and Cities: A New Exploration of the Bay Region" (Geography 182), and "Regions, Peoples, States: On Geographic Inquiry" (Geography 10). He has also taught in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Planning at Sonoma State University, and in the Community Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His teaching joins an attention to the materiality of vernacular and designed landscapes (buildings, infrastructures, open spaces, etc.) with a consuming interest in the history of ideas, lay and expert, about how best to study, theorize, visualize, write about, govern, and intervene on those landscapes.

In his postdoctoral work, he has been a Clarence S. Stein Fellow at the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies, in Cornell University's Department of City and Regional Planning; a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C..; a Mauk and Nunis Fellow at the Huntington Library; and a McColl Fellow at the American Geographical Society Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. He is completing his first book manuscript, a hemispheric intellectual and political history of postwar urbanism that poses a series of questions about the temporality of what it is to plan the urban future on the basis of knowledge about the past. It reconstructs the intellectual network that codified what at the middle of the twentieth century was called "organized research" on urban life, and it traces the emergence of "urban studies" as a new, composite form of expertise, one that arose as geography departments were beginning to disappear from elite universities in the United States. The book draws on material from several cities but is localized mainly on this country's Eastern Seaboard, as well as in South America and, to some extent, Western Europe. A second, longer-term book project expands on his dissertation, a study in the material culture of industrial, deindustrialized, and otherwise non-elite suburbs on the eastern fringes of the San Francisco Bay Area.