Peter Ekman is a cultural and historical geographer of urban America. He is Lecturer in Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, from which he received the Ph.D. in 2016. In his postdoctoral work, he has been a Clarence S. Stein Fellow and Visiting Scholar at the Clarence S. Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies, in Cornell University's Department of City and Regional Planning; and a Mellon Fellow in Urban Landscape Studies at Harvard University's Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C. He has also been a Mauk and Nunis Fellow at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California; a McColl Fellow at the American Geographical Society Library in Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Lecturer in the Department of Geography, Environment, and Planning at Sonoma State University, California's only public liberal-arts college; and Lecturer in the interdisciplinary Community Studies Program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He holds a bachelor's degree from Harvard.
His writing and teaching concern urban form and urban life across America’s long twentieth century; landscape, infrastructure, and the built environment; the intellectual histories of planning and urbanism; suburban, metropolitan, and regional studies; social and geographic thought, broadly conceived; materiality and material culture; temporality and historiography; histories of knowledge, science, and expertise; and diverse questions of abandonment, ruination, and spatial inequality. Articles of his have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Planning History, Planning Perspectives, and History of the Human Sciences.
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 or metropolitan future on the basis of knowledge about the past. Routed through the case of one expressly interdisciplinary center of urban studies founded in 1959 with backing from the Ford Foundation, it reconstructs the intellectual network that codified what at the middle of the twentieth century would come to be called "organized research" on urban life. It also traces the emergence of "urban studies" as a composite form of expertise attuned to the dynamics of cities in the throes of ostensible "crisis" and "renewal." The book draws on material from several cities but is localized mainly on this country's Eastern Seaboard (greater Boston and New York), as well as in South America (chiefly Venezuela) and, to some extent, Western Europe. Timing the Future Metropolis: Planning, Knowledge, and Disavowal in America's Postwar Urbanism is invited for submission to a university press by the end of 2021.
A second, longer-term book project expands on his dissertation, a study in the material culture of industrial and otherwise non-elite suburbs built and abandoned since the late nineteenth century on the eastern fringes of the San Francisco Bay Area. "Suburbs of Last Resort: Landscape, Life, and Ruin on the Edges of San Francisco Bay" was supported by a year-long fellowship from the Bancroft Library.
His writing and teaching concern urban form and urban life across America’s long twentieth century; landscape, infrastructure, and the built environment; the intellectual histories of planning and urbanism; suburban, metropolitan, and regional studies; social and geographic thought, broadly conceived; materiality and material culture; temporality and historiography; histories of knowledge, science, and expertise; and diverse questions of abandonment, ruination, and spatial inequality. Articles of his have appeared in the Journal of Urban History, the Journal of Planning History, Planning Perspectives, and History of the Human Sciences.
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 or metropolitan future on the basis of knowledge about the past. Routed through the case of one expressly interdisciplinary center of urban studies founded in 1959 with backing from the Ford Foundation, it reconstructs the intellectual network that codified what at the middle of the twentieth century would come to be called "organized research" on urban life. It also traces the emergence of "urban studies" as a composite form of expertise attuned to the dynamics of cities in the throes of ostensible "crisis" and "renewal." The book draws on material from several cities but is localized mainly on this country's Eastern Seaboard (greater Boston and New York), as well as in South America (chiefly Venezuela) and, to some extent, Western Europe. Timing the Future Metropolis: Planning, Knowledge, and Disavowal in America's Postwar Urbanism is invited for submission to a university press by the end of 2021.
A second, longer-term book project expands on his dissertation, a study in the material culture of industrial and otherwise non-elite suburbs built and abandoned since the late nineteenth century on the eastern fringes of the San Francisco Bay Area. "Suburbs of Last Resort: Landscape, Life, and Ruin on the Edges of San Francisco Bay" was supported by a year-long fellowship from the Bancroft Library.