In this episode of Talking Headways, journalist Alexis Madrigal discusses his book "The Pacific Circuit" and the relationship between containerization, globalization, and urban change in Oakland. He explains how the blight designation significantly affects West Oakland, allowing urban development projects that displace community power. By drawing connections to Silicon Valley's role in global trade, Madrigal advocates for new thinking around urban change, emphasizing the historical impacts of these decisions and the necessity of re-evaluating urban spaces affected by globalization.
'I think that blight designation opens the door to a lot of things, in part because it destroys so much of the community that would have had quite an amount of substantial social and political power in that place.'
'When a guy named Ben Nutter, who's like the Robert Moses of the Port of Oakland, begins to put together a plan to steal San Francisco's trade and route it into containers, there's not really a lot of anybody to stop him.'
Collection
[
|
...
]