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Rebecca Solnit - Infinite City_001

Rebecca Solnit
Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
Paperback: 167 pages
Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (November 29, 2010)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 9780520262508
ISBN-13: 978-0520262508

Come Venezia, San Francisco è una città piccola; entrambe sono vaste non per il loro territorio ma per le possibilità che offrono all’ immaginazione.
– Rebecca Solnit, Infinite City

Rebecca Solnit

Rebecca Solnit ha realizzato per University of California Press
un atlante di San Francisco (e della Bay Area) davvero speciale.
La scelta attenta e la raccolta di parole e mappe piene di significato catturano ed evocano la realtà e la storia di una città simbolo.
La piacevolezza e la densità del segno sono insieme generazione di sensazioni e di pensieri.

Rebecca Solnit

Writer, historian, and activist Rebecca Solnit is the author of thirteen books about ecology, environment, landscape, community, art, politics, hope, and memory, most recently the bestselling Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, a volume of 19 essays and 22 innovative maps, for which she commissioned and coordinated contributions from 27 writers, artists, and cartographers. Other books include A Paradise Built in Hell: The Extraordinary Communities that Arise in Disaster; A Field Guide to Getting Lost; Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities; Wanderlust: A History of Walking; and River of Shadows, Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West (for which she received a Guggenheim, the National Book Critics Circle Award in criticism, and the Lannan Literary Award). A product of the California public education system from kindergarten to graduate school, she is a contributing editor to Harper’s and regular contributor to the political site Tomdispatch.com .

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

MAPS:

The Names Before the Names

The Names before the Names

Monarchs and Queens, map with artwork by Mona Caron

Monarchs and Queens

“I wanted to make maps gorgeous, seductive, delicious, and beautiful again,” says author Rebecca Solnit, whose 13th book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas (UC Press) has been released in November 2010.

“Cartography used to be both an art and a science. I wanted to return to that.” Solnit’s career up to this point—she has authored books on topics as diverse as human response to disaster, getting lost, and wanderlust—prepared her to create an atlas that maps her specific experience with the city she has called home her entire adult life. Solnit collaborated with 27 writers, cartographers, designers, researchers, and artists to create 22 full-color maps that offer whimsical, insightful views of the city, along with essays that expand on the sometimes-surprising juxtapositions within.

One map, titled “Monarchs and Queens,” shows butterfly habitats alongside queer public spaces.
Another, “Poison/Palate,” plots toxic mines and factories in the Bay Area alongside farmers markets, farms, and artisan food producers.
The multilayered maps are intended to be provocative. For example, her map of the Mission, which is paired with first-person interviews from residents and day laborers, draws the United States-Mexico border at Cesar Chavez Street.

“I chose 22 ways to map San Francisco out of a million possibilities,” says Solnit. “It’s like that old expression: A poem about something ugly can still be beautiful. A map about murder or urban redevelopment can still be beautiful.” Solnit’s research assistant, Stella Lochman, helped her collect data from a rich group, from salmon experts to a handful of San Franciscans who’ve lived in SF nearly 100 years. Mapping the city with their help not only expanded Solnit’s own sense of place, but it also revealed to her the popularity of cartography. “Maps make people happy,” says Solnit. “They show where you are, and people like to know that.”

The atlas was also an attempt to reclaim an art form, offering an alternative to Google Maps and GPS. “Those maps confirm a certain reality,” she says, “but not the only reality.”
Solnit hopes there will eventually be a series of atlases in this style, each mapping a different reality in a different town. “I called the book Infinite City because there are countless ways to consider a place,” she says. “It’s the atlas that’s finite—there is always more.”