Free the Beaches! Andrew Kahrl on the History of Segregation by the Seashore

We hope you’re tanned, rested, and ready, because we’re going to the beach!  There is a lot of mind-rattling SACRPH content coming your way.   You can’t escape the danger.

We recorded a ton of interviews at last Fall’s meeting of the Society of American City and Regional Planning History in Cleveland, Ohio.  We conducted most of them in a busy publishing hall, thinking it would create a certain sense of ambience.  In some cases, it just resulted in a noisy recording.  We did our best trying to clean them up, but we will be rolling out a series of interviews with scholars such as Todd Michney and Carola Hein.

This episode features a really great (intellectually, if not aurally) discussion with UVA professor Andrew Kahrl, about the politics of race, class, and inequality in American waters.  As we have discussed previously on Tropics of Meta, there is something about sharing a liquid space, whether a public pool, lake, or ocean, that triggers deep and abiding anxieties about bodily contact.  Kahrl explore all this and more in our talk at SACRPH.  The true planning nerds will cut through the static like so much hot butter.

The SACRPH Series: Andrew Kahrl on the History of Beaches and Segregation