UC Berkeley

In this dissertation, I explore how novel techniques of urban governance converged with new planning technologies to transform postwar space and politics in the San Francisco Bay Area. I argue that the terms and practices girding contemporary forms of government in metropolises like the Bay Area were forged through modeling and simulation initiatives undertaken by administrators and experts in the decades after World War II.

After surveying the political landscape today, I trace a broad historical shift in the way cities have been understood and acted upon as governmental problems. In current policy discourse, cities are posited as complex systems amenable to market-driven forms of technological management. This formulation stands in contrast to earlier ones. Whereas governing authorities during the early twentieth century sought to secure social order in cities as physical forms by intervening in the built environment to mold moral subjects, contemporary administrators aim to optimize the performance of cities as feedback systems by promoting the conditions under which enterprising patterns of behavior might flourish. To account for this shift, I probe three postwar initiatives pursued in the Bay Area. Together, they helped constitute the grounds upon which market-based modes of urban rule now unfold: a concrete hydraulic model of the San Francisco Bay framed the metropolis as both a set of environmental processes and an object of regional governance; an effort to simulate the housing market in San Francisco on behalf of renewal rendered up the city as a racialized system of communication and surveillance; and the creation of a novel public science museum laid the groundwork for a pedagogical tool now deployed to shape the conduct of urban subjects. Examining the historical construction and political effects of these urban projects contextualizes the governmental scene today.

While Bay Area administrators drew upon wider notions about the city as a managerial problem during the twentieth century, the metropolis itself has since emerged as a kind of neoliberal model. It is a global hearth for the technology industry and home to firms like Google, Facebook, and Twitter among others. It is also a burgeoning site of inequality and precarity. Though critical assessments of the region’s transformation abound, less attention has been paid to the political vision – the governmental reason – that animates it. This work highlights the historical conditions that continue to underwrite such a circumscribed and market-oriented picture of the world. In so doing, I hope it contributes to our collective ability to build a more just urban future.