Pictures of a Gone City

Richard A. Walker

Description

The San Francisco Bay Area is currently the jewel in the crown of capitalism—the tech capital of the world and a gusher of wealth from the Silicon Gold Rush. It has been generating jobs, spawning new innovation, and spreading ideas that are changing lives everywhere. It boasts of being the Left Coast, the Greenest City, and the best place for workers in the USA. So what could be wrong? It may seem that the Bay Area has the best of it in Trump’s America, but there is a dark side of success: overheated bubbles and spectacular crashes; exploding inequality and millions of underpaid workers; a boiling housing crisis, mass displacement, and severe environmental damage; a delusional tech elite and complicity with the worst in American politics.

This sweeping account of the Bay Area in the age of the tech boom covers many bases. It begins with the phenomenal concentration of IT in Greater Silicon Valley, the fabulous economic growth of the bay region and the unbelievable wealth piling up for the 1% and high incomes of Upper Classes—in contrast to the fate of the working class and people of color earning poverty wages and struggling to keep their heads above water. The middle chapters survey the urban scene, including the greatest housing bubble in the United States, a metropolis exploding in every direction, and a geography turned inside out. Lastly, it hits the environmental impact of the boom, the fantastical ideology of TechWorld, and the political implications of the tech-led transformation of the bay region.

Sujets

• Jewish
• Jews
• JewishGen
• Gentrification
• Dot-com bubble
• Historiography
• Sprawl
• Environmental impact
• Real estate economics

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 juin 2018
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781629635231
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Advance Praise for Pictures of a Gone City
San Francisco has battened from its birth on instant wealth, high tech weaponry, and global commerce, and the present age is little different. Gold, silver, and sleek iPhones-they all glitter in the California sun and are at least as magnetic as the city s spectacular setting, benign climate, and laissez-faire lifestyles. The cast of characters changes, but the hustlers and thought-shapers eternally reign over the city and its hinterland, while in their wake they leave a ruined landscape of exorbitant housing, suburban sprawl, traffic paralysis, and delusional ideas about a market free enough to rob the majority of their freedom. Read all about it here, and weep.
-Gray Brechin, author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
Too many studies of cities dwell on their peculiarities; this fascinating book balances the dramatic story of the Bay Area against a profound understanding of urbanization. It eschews a descriptive narrative in favor of hard-hitting critical analysis. The book is not only about the inherently contradictory development of the San Francisco region, but also about where it stands in relation to the rest of the United States, even the world and why it matters so much. No one but Richard Walker combines such an intimate knowledge one city with the theoretical insights necessary to make sense of it.
-Kevin Cox, author of The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception
Debunking the Horatio Alger promotional blather of self-flattering tech moguls, the real Bay Area comes into view, based on nurses and teachers, drivers and clerks, homeless and the desperate. Real estate bubbles have given way to tech bubbles which have given way to housing bubbles, and now have given way to a chimerical prosperity that is as fragile as any of the prior ones.
-Chris Carlsson, San Francisco historian and cofounder of Critical Mass
Walker has given us a brilliantly accessible and fact-laden political economy of the San Francisco Bay Area-America s richest and fastest changing metropolis. Pictures of a Gone City explains both the miracle of Silicon Valley and the heavy price, in growing inequality, unaffordability, and environmental impact, that the Bay Area is paying for it.
-Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism s Stealth Revolution
With Pictures of a Gone City , California s greatest geographer tells us how the Bay Area has become the global center of hi-tech capitalism. Drawing on a lifetime of research, Richard Walker dismantles the mythology of the New Economy, placing its creativity in a long history of power, work, and struggles for justice.
-Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life

Bay Area from space (NOAA)

Map of Bay Area with 10 Counties and Select Cities
Editor: Sasha Lilley
Spectre is a series of penetrating and indispensable works of, and about, radical political economy. Spectre lays bare the dark underbelly of politics and economics, publishing outstanding and contrarian perspectives on the maelstrom of capital-and emancipatory alternatives-in crisis. The companion Spectre Classics imprint unearths essential works of radical history, political economy, theory and practice, to illuminate the present with brilliant, yet unjustly neglected, ideas from the past.
Spectre
Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, and Leo Panitch, In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives
David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance
Sasha Lilley, Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult
Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, and James Davis, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth
Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance
Peter Linebaugh, The Incomplete, True, Authentic, and Wonderful History of May Day
Richard A. Walker, Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area
Spectre Classics
E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
Victor Serge, Men in Prison
Victor Serge, Birth of Our Power

Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area
Richard A. Walker
PM Press 2018
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978-1-62963-510-1
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017964729
Cover by John Yates/Stealworks
Interior design by briandesign
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
www.pmpress.org
Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don t mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don t mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don t sing
all the time
The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don t mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn t half bad
if it isn t you
Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don t much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen
and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to
Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
living it up
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling
mortician
Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
Pictures of the Gone World (1951)
CONTENTS
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
Part I The Golden Economy Beneath the Glitter
INTRODUCTION TO PART I
CHAPTER ONE
Tech City Beyond the Myth of Immaculate Innovation
CHAPTER TWO
Boom Town Winning and Losing the Economic Lottery
CHAPTER THREE
Gold Mountain Wealth, Inequality, and the Class Divide
CHAPTER FOUR
City at Work Making and Fighting for a Living
Part II The New Metropolis Urban Transformation and the Tech Boom
INTRODUCTION TO PART II
CHAPTER FIVE
The New Urbanism Remaking the Heart of the City
CHAPTER SIX
Bubble by the Bay Anatomy of a Housing Crisis
CHAPTER SEVEN
Metro Monster Size, Sprawl, and Segregation
Part III Facing the Future Dreams, Nightmares, and Political Realities
INTRODUCTION TO PART III
CHAPTER EIGHT
Saving Greenland Environmentalism in the Age of Global Warming
CHAPTER NINE
Tech World Utopias and Dystopias of the IT Revolution
CHAPTER TEN
The Right Fight What Future for the Left Coast?
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
INDEX
Preface
WHEN I TELL PEOPLE I HAVE WRITTEN A BOOK ON THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA , they invariably ask, Yes, but what is it about ? For most people, a metropolitan region is a vague idea, too all-encompassing, sprawling, and unbounded to be a proper object of inquiry. To me, the Bay Area is a real thing, a living, breathing entity with its own character, anatomy, and biography, and very much worthy of serious investigation. Mine is a geographer s view of the world in all its immense diversity of places, societies, and landscapes-in spite of the homogenizing effects of markets, modernization, nation building, and globalization.
To be sure, seeing a city as a whole is not obvious. Most people are not used to thinking of metropolitan areas as entities in the same way as well-bordered units such as towns, states, and countries. While almost everyone has a strong sense of their neighborhood and daily realm of movement, and the accompanying sights, smells, and surroundings, at larger scales the geography quickly becomes unfamiliar. Moreover, there is a lot of honest confusion about what is meant by the word city : does it refer to a municipality like Berkeley, an urban realm like Silicon Valley, or a megaregion such as the Bay Area? The latter now stretches about one hundred miles in every direction from San Francisco, encompassing twelve counties and a population of 8.5 million. Even worse, the definition of the region keeps changing as it grows.
Furthermore, cities are hellishly complex systems, consisting of economic bases, social orders, political practices, and much, much more. It is hard, of course, to come to grips with nation-states, but at least they are familiar entities. Big city-regions are not, except in casual references marked by a lot of hand-waving generalizations. At least for countries or the state of California, the researcher can turn to libraries full of books and reams of official data, often with the imprimatur of a recognized disciplina