Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine, 1880-1940
Selling the City: Gender, Class, and the California Growth Machine, 1880-1940
Between 1880 and 1940, California cities were in the vanguard in creating comprehensive city plans and zoning ordinances that came to characterize modern American city growth. This book reveals the means by which property-owning middle-class women achieved entry into the male-dominated sphere of urban planning. It suggests that women in California were not excluded from public life. Instead, they embraced the middle-class ideology of propertied self-interest and participated to the fullest extent possible in the urban struggle for regional dominance that shaped this period of western history. Likewise, as urban historians have presented this story as essentially male, this work suggests that although California’s urban elite often maintai
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Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism
Writer-historian Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg survey San Francisco’s transformation — skyrocketing rents that are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit organizations and the poor; the homogenization of the city’s architecture, industries and population; the decay of its public life; and the erasure of its sites of civic memory.Reporting from the front lines of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg sound a warning bell to all urban residents. Wealth is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty.
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influential women,
Simpson provides a basically optimistic view of the “space” in which white, upper class women could operate, during the period in California up to 1940. You can read the book at two levels. Firstly, and simply, as a good backdrop to the growth of Los Angeles and San Francisco. The narrative helps give more flesh to a time of great urban expansion, that is nowadays often cursorily discussed. Since that expansion was in turn dwarfed by the ever greater growth after World War 2.
But at another level, the book shows how while women might not have been able to hold formal reins of power, in practise, they had more leeway. It is this informal exercise of power that is well described. The merit of the book is in showing that the commonly accepted view of women having little power in that time is perhaps oversimplified. The historical scholarship demonstrated by Simpson is impressive and amply rewards the reader’s attention.
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|A mild success,
Although Rebecca Solnit writes with a deliberate and sometimes myopic agenda, her style is extraordinarily effective in evoking sympathy. It is elegaic in nature and the entire book reads as a eulogy, a fact reinforced by the shuttered structures and funeral processions presented in Schwatzenberg’s photo essays. The digressions into such realms as the origins of Bohemia don’t seem irrelevant or excessive but merely an extension of the beauty of the writing and presentation.
Although the issue has become less pressing with the collapse of the fervor of the internet economy, it should be noted the type of mass evictions in favour of live/work lofts is still a common occurrence in San Francisco, and that housing is still beyond the means of many ordinary San Franciscans. Despite the less fervent pace of gentrification, those in the funeral procession presented in the opening pages will not be returning to their homes; the character of their neighbourhood will not be restored.
The work is a mild success. Although somewhat obsolescent, it is still relevant, whether because of its still necessary impressions on the hearts of those who read it, or as a presentation of a historical phenomenon. But furthermore, as a literary work, and as a visual work, it is beautiful both in its prose and photography.
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|fascinating overview of sf history,
alas, this is not an outdated book. sf has only become more homogenized since its publication (a topic that is crucial to the book, and covered very well in terms of past creative types who’ve inhabited sf).
the book’s overview of sf history is fascinating, and well-presented. solnit did a thoughful, unbiased job of evaluating the housing crisis in sf and its effect on the creative energy of the city. her metaphors are apt, and overarching points are salient.
a highly recommended read to anyone who cares about san francisco history, or who has bemoaned the exodus of its artistic inhabitants.
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|this book has its points, but…,
This book has an interesting subject and lovely photography. I am sympathetic to the plight of gentrification. However, the tone of this feels as though she were a professional complainer. Neighborhoods change, that is a fact of life. The residents who were displaced in this book were undoubtedly not the same residents from the time it was built. You get the sense that the author feels like everything about every neighborhood is worth saving. It isn’t. I’m not going to cry about a neighborhood with less crime. And what solutions are offered? Should one never try to improve a distressed neighborhood, so that no one ever has to move? What sort of building *should* be allowed in a city? Ms. Solnit has some very valid points in this book, but she comes off as anti-change and not really offering anything close to a solution, other than fossilizing San Francisco in the “good old days”, whenever that was for her.
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