Louise Mozingo: The Technocapitalist Metropolitan Landscape, The Silicon Valley as Place | Public Land, Public Space, Public Discourse
Free and open to the public
Louise Mozingo, associate professor of landscape architecture and environmental planning, discusses the Silicon Valley as place. She scrutinizes how the physical form of Silicon Valley came about — agglomerations of parcels, buildings, sidewalks, roads, and open spaces, and land uses uses — with the fundamental conviction that their configuration matters. To ignore the Silicon Valley as a place, ignores a cornerstone of its celebrated alchemy, and its concomitant outsized influence as the fountainhead of unsettling technology now tethering every resident of the planet, whether we accede to it or not.
In 2015, an Obama administration official speaking at an innovation conference made the declaration: “We need to advance the Silicon Valley mode of thinking. Silicon Valley is not a place, it is a state of mind.” From Nikita Khrushchev’s 1958 visit to IBM in San Jose to Pope Francis’s 2016 audience with Eric Schmidt and Mark Zuckerberg, to the recent ascendance of Elon Musk charged to remake the entire United States government — Silicon Valley exerts an outsized, wildly optimistic, allure as a model for elsewhere.
Even the most perceptive interlocutors of the Silicon Valley phenomenon neglect to note, much less describe or analyze, its physical environment, which is difficult to grasp. The diffusion of unprepossessing, low-rise office parks of unmeritorious design strung out along the east side of the San Francisco Peninsula from San Francisco to San Jose, connected by a network of freeways, engenders confusion not distinction.
About the Series
Public Land, Public Space, Public Discourse, presented by the Department of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning, aims to spark critical thinking about how perceptions of public space and land impact our disciplines. Academics, practitioners, writers, and thinkers will bring a range of perspectives to a semester-long discussion of public realms.
About the Speaker
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Professor of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning; Faculty Program Director, Master of Urban Design
ACCESSIBILIY
The auditorium is wheelchair accessible. If you require accommodations to fully participate in this event, please contact Christina Hausle at least 10 days prior to the event.