Futures Past: Histories of Scenario Planning in the Bay Area

Join the STS Graduate Workshop over Zoom for Futures Past: Histories of Scenario Planning in the Bay Area on Thursday, March 3rd, 2022 from 2- 3 pm PST. John Elrick received his PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley in 2021. He currently teaches in the Department of Sociology at Berkeley. You can learn more about what he'll be discussing in his recent article Simulating renewal: Postwar technopolitics and technological urbanism.

This talk explores the historical and technological conditions that frame neoliberal forms of urban government in US cities today. It focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area, and the city of San Francisco in particular, as a site of burgeoning social inequality and ongoing governmental preoccupation. Over the past few decades, municipal officials have sought to address social problems in the region – from housing precarity and homelessness to environmental racism and climate change – through a governing framework premised on the deployment of market-based technologies and entrepreneurial forms of organization. How did such a market-oriented mode of technical management take hold as an appropriate rubric for municipal action? How did this city – as a distinct kind of problem-space – come to be in the first place?

To lend perspective on these questions, this presentation examines the ways in which urban professionals worked to reconceptualize and remake the Bay Area as a problem of government in the decades after World War II. It details how planners, engineers, and other experts drew on novel simulation and scenario planning technologies to model the metropolis as a complex socio-ecological system amenable to technical forms of evaluation and performance ‘optimization.’ A military-driven hydraulic modeling project rendered the bay actionable as a set of processes at ‘the scale of nature’; a raced and classed effort to simulate housing markets on behalf of urban renewal affirmed in principle the character of the city as a communication system; and the establishment of an interactive model for public science education provided later administrators with a means to encourage urban subjects to invest in themselves as units of human capital. In offering an account of these historical initiatives, this presentation highlights how planning practices and technologies – as well as the technical forms of knowledge they enable – are themselves infused with politics and uneven power relations.