Synopses & Reviews
Reclaiming San Francisco is an anthology of fresh appraisals of the contrarian spirit of the city—a spirit “resistant to authority or control.” The official story of San Francisco is one of progress, development, and growth. But there are other, unofficial, San Francisco stories, often shrouded in myth and in danger of being forgotten, and they are told here: stories of immigrants and minorities, sailors and waterfront workers, and poets, artists, and neighborhood activists—along with the stories of speculators, land-grabbers, and the land itself that need to be told differently.
Contributors include historians, geographers, poets, novelists, artists, art historians, photographers, journalists, citizen activists, an architect, and an anthropologist. Passionate about the city, they want San Francisco to be more itself and less like the city of office towers, chain stores, theme parks, and privatized public services and property that appears to be its immediate fate.
San Francisco is not alone in being transformed according to the dictates of the global economy. But San Franciscans are unusual in their readiness to confront the corporate agenda for their city.
Synopsis
San Francisco's history, politics, and culture here receive fresh appraisals: Popular resistance to the corporate agenda, waterfront labor struggles that reshaped the City and set the stage for economic globalization, the need to preserve the library (and the book) as a public resource, the dynamics of Presidio redevelopment, the gay leather scene, the role of tycoons in imperial city building, and the new Civic Center as a symbolic emblem.
Here too are the stories of artists, writers, and neighborhood activists who have contributed to San Francisco's self-awareness and have been vital to the growth of organic communities in Chinatown, the Tenderloin, Manilatown, the Fillmore, the Mission, and North Beach.
Synopsis
Nonfiction. " This book celebrates the fact that we live in the most glorious of all human creations, a city, with living streets, more like ancient Athens or Samarkhand or Calcutta than like the aggregate office block/parking lot/shopping malls that once were modern American cities and still bear their names. Read it to understand why San Francisco is still alive - and how we have to defend it"-Joan Holden, San Francisco Mime Troupe.
About the Author
Urban historian, founder of the magazine Processsed World, and creator of the acclaimed CD-ROM Shaping San Francisco. He was a contributing editor of Bad Attitude: Processed World Anthology (Verso), Reclaiming San Francisco (City Lights Books), and Critical Mass: Bicycling's Defiant Celebration(AK Press).