The Metropolitan History Workshop presents a public lecture:

 

Saving the City for Whom?

Gender, Race, and Redevelopment in the Twentieth Century

 

Alison Isenberg

Associate Professor of History

Rutgers University

 

Friday, Sept. 28, 1:00-2:30 p.m.

Angell Hall, Room G115

 

Alison Isenberg is the author of DOWNTOWN AMERICA: A HISTORY OF THE PLACE AND THE PEOPLE WHO MADE IT (University of Chicago Press, 2005), which won the Ellis W. Hawley Prize from the Organization of American Historian and the Lewis Mumford Prize for Best Book in American Planning History.

 

Professor Isenberg's lecture will examine urban renewal, historic preservation, and the racial and gender aspects of shopping and consumption in asking: Who should be downtown? Whose interests and spending underpin the urban commercial economy? These questions have been central to the history of downtown design, and have stirred civil rights protesters, real estate appraisers, suburban housewives, and postcard artists--in addition to the more familiar planners, architects, business executives, and government officials. Prof. Isenberg's lecture examines the interplay of these forces in shaping the urban transformations of the twentieth century, ending with close analysis of a controversy over commercial space, public art, and urban design in San Francisco during the 1960s.

 

For additional information, please contact Matt Lassiter at mlassite@umich.edu.

 

More information about the Metropolitan History Workshop can be found at

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~mlassite/metro/metroworkshop.html