Peter Ekman

Geographer, 2021-2024 Berggruen Fellow

Peter Ekman holds a Ph.D. in geography from the University of California, Berkeley. He has held postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard University’s Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection in Washington, D.C., and at Cornell University’s Clarence Stein Institute for Urban and Landscape Studies. His work has appeared in History of the Human SciencesPlanning Perspectives, the Journal of Planning History, and the Journal of Urban History, among other venues. A cultural and historical geographer, he writes on cities, suburbs, and metropolitan regions across the long twentieth century, chiefly but not only in the United States. His first book, under review, assembles a hemispheric intellectual history of postwar planning, urbanism, design, and social science. At USC, he will be directing a project on urban futures, posing questions about knowledge, expertise, and the temporalities underlying what it is to plan. As a continuing fellow at Berggruen, he will be further conceptualizing the spatial and scalar dimensions of the planetary.

By Peter Ekman

Berggruen Fellows Aim to Reinvent Governance, Imagine Radically Different Futures for Global Systems and Institutions

’This Fluid Situation’: Sequencing the Cybernetic Highway at Ciudad Guayana, 1961-1976