This morning I received an email from Lisa Bruce of “Berkeley Together” warning about the up-zoning legislation by the Berkeley City Council in their meeting on July 23, 2024. Here is a link to the letter, and if that disappears, here is a permanent copy of that letter. In the letter Bruce argues that “Although […]
Berkeley Together! Read More »
African American residents in Berkeley, California: Year (Decennial Census) Number of African-Americans Percent of Berkeley Population 1970 27,421 23.5% 1980 20,671 20.0% 1990 19,309 18.8% 2000 14,007 13.6% 2010 11,241 10.0% 2020 9,812 7.9% sources: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/cities/Berkeley.htm , https://data.census.gov/table In 1963, James Baldwin remarked about redevelopment specifically in San Francisco: “urban renewal equals Negro removal.” In
NIMBYism as Segregationism Read More »
Background to these Visualizations In the fall of 2018 I responded to the invitation by BART and the City of Berkeley for ideas about redeveloping North Berkeley Station site. I proposed that the station should be renamed by the local Ohlone group who have lived in this area for millennia, and I believe they should
North Berkeley BART visualizations Read More »
This week in America the main news is about how the right-wing majority of Supreme Court justices intend to overturn Roe v. Wade and allow states to make abortion completely illegal under all circumstances. The newfangled ‘originalist’ reasoning of Samuel Alito discards 50 years of precedent in Roe—and indeed anything beyond the Tenth Amendment—by attempting
Housing in California: the need to accommodate refugees Read More »
I have several students who are struggling to focus on their term paper research topics because they find that all planning issues are inter-connected. On the one hand I praise them, because holistic thinking is one of the distinctive traits of a well-educated planner. On the other hand, I urge them to figure out how
Cities in Transition: Discerning the Sequence Read More »
We need to enable major densification of selected California cities to accommodate our own climate refugees. Yesterday I pointed out that there are many cities and towns in the Coast Range and Sierra Nevada that will eventually have to be evacuated due to a permanent rise in fire risk. The State Insurance Commissioner can soften
Where to Resettle Californians? Read More »
As Californians we need to re-think where we build and rebuild our towns and cities. Paradise, California was largely destroyed by the Camp Fire on November 8, 2018. The immediate reaction of community leaders was ‘We will rebuild.’ The question I raised with my students was: ‘Have the leaders and residents of Paradise consulted with
Fire Risk and California Settlement Patterns Read More »
In our Cities in a Global Society course, one of the fundamental themes is cosmopolitanism. I introduced the idea early in the course with the article by Mary Kaldor. Cosmopolitanism is an ancient, Stoic ideal of universal human identity–of being a ‘citizen of the world.’ I give credit to the dissident ancient Greeks who coined
Yazidis, ISIS, and aggressive cosmopolitanism Read More »
One of the peculiar traits of modern nation-states is that they try to collapse together a variety of things into one, politically-effective bundle: 1. The population is reframed as the ‘body politic,’ which Hobbes portrayed as a literal metaphor in 1651. 2. The spatial territory is considered an integral part of the ‘nation.’ Symbolically, the
The fight over the past: the politics of official history Read More »