"Urban Crisis and Information Systems: Lockheed Missiles and Space Company’s Analysis of California’s Earthly Problems"

Announcing his candidacy for governor of California, Ronald Reagan declared, “The only thing that’s gone up more than spending is crime. Our city streets are jungle paths after dark.” Using a racist metaphor to gain support among white voters, his speech shows that by 1966, postwar optimism had given way to social unrest in cities and conservatism in suburbs. This caused political leaders to seek technocratic solutions for what they understood as the root of the problem, Urban Crisis.
In California, to address the complexity of these earthly problems spanning transportation, waste management, crime prevention, economic development, and welfare, Governor Pat Brown hired Lockheed Missiles and Space Company in 1965 to conduct a six month systems analysis titled, California Statewide Information System Study. Mapping California’s organizational objectives, data-handling activities, and information requirements, the study examined the executive branch, legislature, courts, and local governments. Hence, this public-private partnership planned to resolve the complexity facing California’s urban centers by standardizing its autonomous electronic data processing operations.
I study California’s partnership with Lockheed in the political context of the urban crisis and the rise of Reagan conservatism through literature on Racial Capitalism, History of Capitalism, and History of Science and Technology. Doing so, I analyze Urban Crisis as the result of processes that inscribed racial inequalities in the built environment, from the segregation of suburban space (Glotzer, 2020) to the embedding of spatial neglect through municipal debt (Jenkins, 2021). Moreover, I show how these public-private partnerships marked a shift where activities previously understood as unprofitable but necessary for capital investment were reconceived as sources of capital accumulation (Offner, 2019). Lastly, I reveal how public institutions hired private firms to apply technologies—developed with government funding and used for military purposes in the 1940s and 1950s—to domestic problems in the 1960s (Light, 2003).