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Kemp Family Symposium on Geography and History: "People’s Park Again: Landscape and the Production of Space"

Thursday, October 2, 2014
12:00 AM
1014 Tisch Hall

Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies <br> Thursday Series <br> Kemp Family Symposium on Geography and History <br> Don Mitchell, Syracuse University

Presented in conjunction with the Kemp Family Symposium on Geography and History. Link for the full symposium schedule of events.

Abstract: Twenty years ago, Professor Mitchell argued the importance of examining how urban space was produced as landscape versus how it was produced as public space. In this talk, he will return to the site of that argument – People’s Park in Berkeley – and examine recent efforts to redevelop it. In doing so Professor Mitchell will elucidate a key argument about the production of space, namely that actually existing spaces develop out of the capitalist tendency to produce “abstract space” (which aligns closely to “landscape”), a tendency countered by struggles to create “differential space.”

Don Mitchell is a Distinguished Professor of Geography in the Maxwell School at Syracuse University. He is the author of The Lie of the Land: Migrant Workers and the California Landscape (1996); Cultural Geography: A Critical Introduction (2000); The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space (2003); The People’s Property? Power, Politics, and the Public, with Lynn Staeheli (2008), and They Saved the Crops: Landscape, Labor, and the Struggle for Industrial Farming in Bracero-Era California (2012). Mitchell is a recipient of a MacArthur, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Fellowships and was the 2012 recipient of the Retzius Medal in Gold, one of the Vega Awards, given by the King of Sweden on Vega Day, April 24. Mitchell is the founder of the People’s Geography Project and serves on the advisory board of Syracuse Community Geography. Currently he is a Distinguished Visiting Fellow in the Advanced Research Collaborative at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

Free and open to the public.

The Kemp Family Symposium on Geography and History has been made possible by a generous contribution from the Kemp Family Fund, consisting of four generations of University of Michigan graduates with a lifelong commitment to encourage the study of history; not only as a way to learn about the past, but as a guide to understand the present and to anticipate the future. Additional support from the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, Department of History, International Institute, Rackham Graduate School, and Institute for the Humanities. 

Speaker:
Don Mitchell,<br>Syracuse University<br>Kemp Family Symposium on Geography and History