Watching the meeting

The short version of 1964, built around the Sproul Hall steps and the speech everybody quotes and few have heard in full.

Twenty-seven seconds of the actual recording, from 1964. Everything else about the Free Speech Movement is commentary on this.

Twenty minutes of unnarrated film. No interpretation, no music, no argument — just what the plaza looked like.

Contemporary footage of the park’s founding and the confrontation that followed, including the National Guard deployment.

An hour from a participant. Partisan, and worth hearing precisely because it is a first-hand account rather than a summary.

The contemporary newsreel. Useful for how fast the city rebuilt, and what it rebuilt in.

In 1968 Berkeley desegregated its schools by two-way busing with no court order compelling it — the first US city of its size to do so. This is a student’s account of it.

The city of Berkeley was the first in the United States to divest from apartheid South Africa, in 1979, before the campus did. This panel connects the two campaigns.

The archaeology and the development fight, from the Ohlone side. This is why land acknowledgements are read at the top of Council meetings and why the site keeps returning to the agenda.

The Center for Independent Living was founded in Berkeley in 1972 and ran the first curb-cut programme in the country. The modern disability rights movement starts on these streets.

The students in Cowell Hospital who would not accept the terms they were offered, and what they built afterwards.

Local historian Richard Schwartz on the town between incorporation and the earthquake — the decades that decided the street grid you still drive on.

George Berkeley, the philosopher the College of California named this place for in 1866, owned enslaved people. The city has had to decide what to do with that.

The Panthers were founded in Oakland, but the organising, the prosecutions and the free-breakfast programme all ran across the Berkeley line. Regional context for a Berkeley story.

The San Francisco earthquake pushed enough people across the bay to turn a college town into a city within a few years. No single documentary owns this; the search does.

The decision itself, reported at the time. Watch it next to the 1969 footage above; it is the same square of ground.

The end of the campaign: in 2024 the parcel was bought and placed under Indigenous stewardship, after an appeal reached the state Supreme Court.

The 2021 resolution that started the process. What eventually came out of it is the middle-housing rule described on the guide page — and that rule removed the appeal route entirely for the projects it covers.

Ministerial approval in practice. If you have ever been told “take it to the Zoning Adjustments Board”, this is the category of project that no longer goes there.

The housing-element scale of the argument, as opposed to the single-parcel scale most coverage stays at.

The town-gown dispute that briefly capped admissions and then produced a change in state law. The single best explainer of why Berkeley’s housing politics are not like anywhere else’s.

The moment a local land-use lawsuit became statewide news.

Measure D, passed in 2014: a penny an ounce on distributors, the first such tax in the country, and a working example of Berkeley using the municipal ballot as a policy instrument.

The other half of the soda-tax story, and a useful reminder that a municipal ballot measure can attract national money.

The elected rent board explaining its own jurisdiction. Most residents do not know this body exists, let alone that they vote for it.

Dry, official, and the clearest statement anywhere of what registration and the annual general adjustment actually require.

The city’s own launch session for the South Berkeley corridor plan. Long, but it is the primary record of how the plan was framed before anyone argued about it.

An ordinary contested item, filmed. A good sample of what a Berkeley Council fight looks like when it is not about housing.

Berkeley invented the bicycle boulevard and still argues about every block of it. Street changes go through the Transportation and Infrastructure Commission before they reach Council.

Berkeley elects its Mayor directly and citywide by ranked-choice vote. See Mayor for what the office can and cannot do.

An hour, unedited, of the city describing itself. Compare it against the agenda packets and you learn a lot about both.

Budget hearings are where the abstractions become numbers. No single recording is canonical, and the open-data portal’s budget file has not been touched since 2016 — see Data.

A recurring, genuinely contested item with no single authoritative video. Search it rather than trust one clip.

The shortest correct explanation. Watch it if the KQED one above went too fast.

Berkeley uses the single-winner form for every office. This explains the multi-winner variant, which is what people usually mean when they claim ranked-choice does something Berkeley’s does not.

Rent board seats are elected citywide, on slates, in the same election as everything else. Five seats at a time, and almost nobody reports on them.

This site does not publish a candidate list — see Vote for why. Forums are usually recorded by whoever hosted them, and a search finds them faster than we could list them.

The restaurant that gave the Shattuck Avenue blocks north of campus the name Gourmet Ghetto, and gave American cooking an argument it is still having.

Telegraph in the person of one bookseller. The avenue’s commercial politics have been a Council item, on and off, for fifty years.

The student paper’s own look at the shop. Short, and a good sample of what the Daily Cal covers that nobody else does.

A mural rededication that doubles as a walking history of the two most argued-over blocks in the city.

The waterfront is a live Council matter: the pier has been closed for years and the ferry is a recurring proposal with a real price tag.

What a capital project looks like from outside: a number, a grant, and a timeline nobody will commit to.

The lagoon between the freeway and the frontage road, and the reason the Parks, Recreation and Waterfront Commission exists.

The library is funded by a dedicated tax and governed by its own board of trustees, not by the Council. Another separate room worth knowing about.

The club that pushed the curving streets, the unpaved look and the brown-shingle house. Berkeley’s design politics are older than its zoning code.

It is called the Oakland fire and it burned into Berkeley. It is why the middle-housing rules stop at the high fire hazard line in the hills.

First-hand, thirty years on. Evacuation routes in the hills are a standing agenda item, and this is why.

Founded in 1969, running Berkeley’s curbside recycling since 1973 and the farmers’ markets since 1987. A private non-profit doing what most cities do in-house.