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Publication
Description
What makes a place? Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit's brilliant reinvention of the traditional atlas, searches out the answer by examining the many layers of meaning in one place, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically--connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge's foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock's filming of Vertigo. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures--butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more. Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us--or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai. CONTRIBUTORS: Cartographers: Ben Pease and Shizue Seigel Designer: Lia Tjandra Artists: Sandow Birk, Mona Caron, Jaime Cortez, Hugh D'Andrade, Robert Dawson, Paz de la Calzada, Jim Herrington, Ira Nowinski, Alison Pebworth, Michael Rauner, Gent Sturgeon, Sunaura Taylor Writers and researchers: Summer Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin, Heather Smith, Richard Walker Additional cartography: Darin Jensen; Robin Grossinger and Ruth Askevold, San Francisco Estuary Institute… (more)
User reviews
One particularly attractive map is called “Monarchs and Queens: Butterfly Habitats and Queer Public Spaces,” an interesting juxtaposition, but there are more than two dozen species of butterfly (colorfully scattered across the map) that inhabit particular neighborhoods. The map and accompanying article highlight the history of San Francisco as a “sanctuary city for both human beings and others.” More than twenty percent of the voting population in San Francisco is gay.
Another map, “Cinema City: Muybridge Inventing Movies, Hitchcock Making Vertigo,” pinpoints locations significant to Eadweard Muybridge, who lived in San Francisco between 1855 and 1881, and locations seen in the Hitchcock film Vertigo. Even tourists will be intrigued. Other interesting presentations include “The Names Before the Names: The Indigenous Bay Area”; “Graveyard Shift: The Lost Industrial City of 1960 and the Remnant 6 A.M. Bars”; and “Phrenological San Francisco,” which playfully imposes a profiled head over the San Francisco map and delineates pseudoscientific names over the various neighborhoods as if to reveal the psychological makeup of the city.
The development of San Francisco into a metropolis created many upheavals in the lives of residents. The city has a history of activism and many locally famous battles have been fought and sometimes even won by the underdog. Many such battles are commemorated here, as are various neighborhoods like Civic Center, The Mission District and The Fillmore.
Readers who know San Francisco well will appreciate Infinite City most of all. Even though I lived there when urban development and neighborhood activism were at their peak, many of the details of what went on were unknown to me. My focus was elsewhere. So even I have learned a lot from this book!
Rebecca Solnit and her team of cartographers, writers, and
Despite some questionable topics, I found the majority of the maps and accompanying essays to be really fun and fascinating (Rebecca Solnit in particular has a really great writerly voice, and I enjoyed all of her essays). I have visited the city many times, to visit friends or family, or just to have fun, and my mom grew up there (and I grew up an hour away from the city), so I am pretty familiar with it. It was fun to get more insight into the history of the city that I was not aware of before (such as the late-night bars that the dockworkers used to frequent, and the lives of people to inhabit the Mission district). I feel that people who are familiar with the city would appreciate and enjoy this book the most, but even readers who have never set foot there will be able to take away something about this truly infinite city, and perhaps even be inspired to take a journey to San Francisco themselves.