Pictures of a Gone City... Bay Area, by Richard A. Walker

 

Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area by Richard A. Walker
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This book is a brilliantly researched and highly accessible presentation of the Boom Town to Metro Monster of "Size, Sprawl, and Segregation," (p. 236) and "technotopian escapism," the Bay Area "megaregion" (xiii) has become in which "Both Right and Left versions of this dystopia are wrong" (346-7). Walker presents a clear-eyed, data-driven (in a GOOD way) and frankly awe-inspiring history and explication of the crazy mess of land, humans, water, air, highways, businesses and neighborhoods the San Francisco Bay Area; as only a long-time resident and broadly experienced professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley could.

     Spectre Books from Oakland's PM Press is purportedly "works of, and about, radical political economy;" but after living here nearly a decade and observing the havoc of speed and greed around us, I don't find Pictures of a Gone City "radical" at all. He's just telling the truth he's garnered from vast scholarship, in pursuit of some answers and solutions that would make life easier for the largest number, rather than just the insanely wealthy and/or desperately politically connected elites.
Uncomfortable, All-American, end-of-the-continent truths.     

I've SEEN "the buying of (California legislative) propositions by the monied interests...undermining the legislative process" (371) in everything from keeping dialysis unsafe, unaffordable and inconvenient to turning delivery drivers into wage slaves so that corporate owners and management could hoard ridiculous power and wealth in the teeth of terrible human suffering and oppression of the unhoused, poor and otherwise disenfranchised. 

     A Canadian departmental director in the Vancouver, BC Women and Children's Hospital, for example, sneered bitterly "It's ALL ABOUT MONEY DOWN THERE" to me about our infant mortality rate and lack of national health care, and she was absolutely correct. Americans have lost our way in the humane values department, and it's no more visible than in California and the Bay Area.

    

     Problem is, it's also potentially more fixable "down here" than other places, too, if we'd only use the wonderful tools, human and other social and structural resources we have arrayed within and around us.
Throughout the book, Walker stresses the "five strands" of the Tech world's "success," which actually could be used to heal rather than destroy: 

"Social Openness," 

"Labor Power," 

the "Counterculture Rebellion" of alternative-thinking inventiveness, 

"Racial (and other) Diversity" and, for better or worse, 

"the Tech Titans' faith in libertarian capitalism...colliding with the Bay Area progressive tradition that nurtured the IT industry" to begin with. 

     They're "socially liberal but economically conservative," which hobbles them, their previous four strands of success and the whole area with "neoconservatism and neoliberalism" combined. This leaves us trying to dance both forwards and backwards at the same time, stepping on each others' toes and kicking each others' shins fighting over who goes first, who gets to take the lead and has the best (most distant?) view of the poisonously polluted but very "scenic" Bay. (362-365)

     Thorough, extremely readable and well-paced; other sections range from "The Golden Economy: Beneath the Glitter," through "City at Work: Making and Fighting for a Living," "Bubble by the Bay: Anatomy of a Housing Crisis" (193) to "Environmentalism in the Age of Global Warming" (279) and speculations on the "Future for the Left Coast," aptly subtitled, “Dreams, Nightmares and Political Realities.” (350)

     The good thing about the Bay Area is that "there's no place quite like it," but that's also the bad thing about it, too. Wonderful book. 

     Congratulations to Prof. Walker. A boon to metropolitan geographers worldwide, as well as Californians and Bay Area residents.

View all my reviews