From People’s Park to Black Panther Oakland, the notion of liberated territories shaped counterculture politics and their radical geographies. Anthony Raynsford, Bonnie Ora Sherk, and Lisa Uddin explore this heritage and its relevance for contemporary social engagement. Moderated by Sean Burns.

Anthony Raynsford is associate professor of art history at San Jose State University. An architectural and urban design historian, Raynsford is particularly interested in researching the ways in which cities have been visually imagined and represented by artists, architects, and urban planners. Recent publications include “Civic Art in an Age of Cultural Relativism: The Aesthetic Origins of Kevin Lynch’s Image of the City” (Journal of Urban Design) and “Urban Contrast and Neo-Toryism: On the Social and Political Symbolism of The Architectural Review’s Townscape Campaign” (Planning Perspectives). Raynsford is currently working on an intellectual and cultural history of pluralism in postwar Anglo-American urban design.

Bonnie Ora Sherk is a New York- and San Francisco-based artist, planner, landscape architect, and educator, whose creative practice connects people of all ages to landscapes, ecosystems, and opportunities. In 1974, she launched Crossroads Community (the farm), a seven-acre urban agriculture and multi-arts community space that connected diverse land fragments and communities, incorporating a freeway interchange in San Francisco. Sherk's passionate commitment to place continues with A Living Library, a series of place-based, ecological, community-engaged transformation projects with systemically integrated hands-on learning programs that unearths buried urban streams and turns asphalted public space into thriving educational eco-art gardens and nature walks to demonstrate interconnected systems: biological, cultural, technological.

Lisa Uddin is an assistant professor of art history and visual culture studies at Whitman College. She is the author of Zoo Renewal: White Flight and the Animal Ghetto and various writings on US visual culture and the built environment at the human/nonhuman interface. Her current research considers the visual and spatial practices of California’s black culture makers in the long 1960s.

Sean Burns is director of the Office of Undergraduate Research and Scholarships at UC Berkeley, and writes and teaches on social movement history. He was awarded the Chancellor's Faculty Civic Engagement Award (2014) and the American Cultures Teaching Innovation Award (2015) for his course on the social movement history of the Bay Area, in which students contribute original research to the website of Shaping San Francisco (FoundSF.org). Burns’s first book, a biography of San Francisco public intellectual Archie Green, was awarded the 2012 CLR James Book of the Year Award.