[lbo-talk] life in neoliberal Berkeley

Chuck Grimes cagrimes42 at gmail.com
Wed Sep 4 16:42:16 PDT 2013


Wow. Was that a read or what? Get her on your show if you can and figure out a way through the interview to slightly generalize the transformations so they really capture a large frame than the interiority of Berkeley City politics. It's just a model of what happened in a larger scale.

I can't find a single detail or concept that isn't right on. But I would like to note, the very fact that Zelda Bronsein was on the planning commission is important as a commentary itself for where radical consciousness disappeared to around here. They are here and there and some like Bronstein actually count for something.

I sure wish my ex-wife had followed Zelda Bronstein around downtown instead of the Loni Hancock gang. It was a horror at the time but later turned into a fasinating study of how somebody I knew intimately was transformed by her city planning job in the late 1970s exactly when the first serious moves that Bronstein outlined were cooked into the toxic brew of the new business friendly Democrat. And so wow am I glad somebody wrote that book. All the same issues of the university -- city development plans, the push on zoning law, the downtown plan, the recycling system, the fed money mandates, and on and on were all dinner conversations ... The magic turn to bullshit by the Sierra Club was ripening in the same era over Yosemite's mastern plan for park use, an issue that directly impacted my weekend climbing. Fucking idiots.

There are too many thoughts going on in my head. Just get to an interview some time.

And thanks greatly for posting this.

CG

ps. this was also the era when the concept of urban geography that Harvey based his academic life was being created as a field in geography. At that point is was over in the College of Natural Resources and my first climbing teacher-partner had a adjunct job there to get by. He used to take the class on field trips to SF development of the warehouse district behind the waterfront of Bay Street....as well as Yosemite as a planning problem.



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list