Reimagining the City

SFMOMA becomes a venue for discussing public issues in this monthly series. What does our urban landscape reveal about power and planning in San Francisco? Author and geographer Gray Brechin looks back at early Bay Area planning initiatives, in particular during the Works Progress Administration, and traces the impact of those large-scale structures on the city today, while urban planner and architect Robin Abad Ocubillo discusses the role of a range of constituents in contemporary planning efforts to make and remake the city and its neighborhoods. Moderated by Deena Chalabi, co-curator of Public Knowledge and Associate Curator of Public Dialogue at SFMOMA.

Gray Brechin
Dr. Gray Brechin received his B.A. (History and Geography), M.A. (Art History), and Ph.D. (Geography) from the University of California Berkeley and is the author of the best-selling book Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (UC Press, 1999, 2006.) He is the founder and Project Scholar of the Living New Deal hosted by the UC Berkeley Department of Geography.

Robin Abad Ocubillo
Robin Abad Ocubillo is Senior Planner and Urban Designer at the SF Planning Department. His current and past work in San Francisco and Los Angeles has focused on civic innovation in public space design, management, evaluation, and policy. He is lead policy planner for the San Francisco Places for People Ordinance, the first-ever municipal framework in country for amplifying tests of community-generated public space experiments - and their governance - in streets and open lots. Robin has extensively developed research methods and metrics for human-use evaluation of public spaces, and is co-author of the Global Public Life Data Protocol. He is also Senior Lecturer in Department of Architecture at the California College of the Arts, focusing on the intersection of landscape architecture and civic governance.

Free to the public

Note: This event will be taking place at a location outside the San Francisco network of public libraries. For questions concerning the event, please contact the hosting library: Public Knowledge Branch (SFMOMA).