City dwellers throughout the country are losing publicly owned spaces such as parks and waterways as politicians slash budgets.
Harold Perkins, an assistant professor of geography at Ohio University, will speak about urban environmental amenities and how politics affect their distribution between wealthy and poor areas. He will speak at 4 p.m. today in 119 Clippinger Hall.
“Most of the time, if you look at a typical city … those amenities are not evenly distributed throughout the city,” Perkins said. “They tend to be located in wealthier neighborhoods.”
Perkins is the last speaker of Fall Quarter’s Geography Colloquium series. The series usually includes one speaker from outside Ohio University, one OU professor from the Department of Geography, and one from another department.
Perkins’ speech is titled “Consent to Neoliberal Hegemony Through Coercive Urban Environmental Governance.”
Perkins received a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin and will draw on his time there by using the Milwaukee park system as a case study.
Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, who served as the county executive of Milwaukee County for 10 years, made budget cuts that significantly hurt public spaces in the city, Perkins said.
“What he did throughout his 10-year tenure as Milwaukee County executive was decimate the park system," Perkins added.
In response to the shrinking aid, many philanthropies and private corporations are taking on the management of the park system. Although that has created some well-maintained public amenities, they are disproportionally placed in wealthier areas. Inner-city areas are home to more public spaces in a state of disrepair, Perkins said.
“Parks become kind of a vehicle for understanding the larger political change,” he said. “So I think it reflects the larger economic shifts that are going on in our big, industrial cities.”
Admission to the lecture is free. It is intended to last about an hour.
bv111010@ohiou.edu
