Infinite City: A San Francisco AtlasWhat 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 |
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LibraryThing Review
User Review - Daniel.Estes - LibraryThingIf there's such a thing as a conventional atlas, Infinite City: San Francisco is the furthest thing from it. And that's not a bad thing. The whole is a mix of historical, sociological and ... Read full review
LibraryThing Review
User Review - kaylaraeintheway - LibraryThingThis was a really fascinating book! It first came to my attention when my younger sister started school at USF a few years ago, and she was required to get this book as part of a freshman seminar ... Read full review
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Bibliographic information
| Title | Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas A Chairman's Circle Book Series Infinite cities |
| Author | Rebecca Solnit |
| Editor | Rebecca Solnit |
| Edition | illustrated |
| Publisher | Univ of California Press, 2010 |
| ISBN | 0520262506, 9780520262508 |
| Length | 156 pages |
| Subjects | › › › History / United States / State & Local / West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY) |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |