Sheila Lodge Tells Santa Barbara’s All

At this point, there are few things Sheila Lodge hasn’t done. Most obviously, Lodge was the first woman to be elected the mayor of Santa Barbara in 1981, ushering in a four-decade run of successive mayoral matriarchs, with only the briefest of male interruptions since — and that was only for a few months in 1993.

But gender politics was never really the point for Lodge — planning was. Planning was always the tool that Lodge wielded to limit otherwise unfettered forces of growth and development in hopes of fostering a lively, vibrant, functional city accessible to people of all income levels. That it hasn’t quite worked out that way is, by now, pretty obvious. But that’s never stopped Lodge from trying in her many council and commission roles, always with the goal to maintain the uniquely human scale of Santa Barbara’s built environment.

That is the fight Lodge details in her new book, an easy-to-read primer on the history of planning, Santa Barbara style. Santa Barbara, An Uncommonplace American Town reveals that these battles date considerably further back than the late, great oil spill of 1969, popularly misconstrued as the lightbulb moment for Santa Barbara’s environmental awakening.