Hollow City - The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism

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. Hollow City surveys San Francisco's transformation - skyrocketing residential and commercial 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. California's Bay Area is home to nearly a third of the venture capital and internet businesses in the United States, generating a boom economy and a massive influx of well-paid workers that has transformed the face of San Francisco. Once the great anomaly among American cities, San Francisco is today only the most dramatically affected among the many urban centers experiencing cultural impoverishment as a result of new forms and distributions of wealth. A collaboration between writer-hiostorian Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg, Hollow City surveys San Francisco's transformation - skyrocketing residential and commercial 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. Written as a tour of the city's distinctive characters and locales, Solnit's text grounds the current evictions in earlier histories of urban renewal and the economic geography of artists, from Haussmann's impact on the Paris of Baudelaire, to the relationship between the Beats and San Francisco's African-American community during 'negro removal' of the 1950s. She investigates the ways wealth is now clear-cutting the cultural richness of American urban life, erasing space for idealism, dissent, memory and vulnerable populations. Schwartzenberg's photo-essays document the profusion of construction and demolition projects in the city, the imperial spaces of dot-com businesses, the proliferation of retail chains, and the rapid disappearance of areas in which artists can live and create. They feature works by more than a dozen San Francisco artists Surveying the transformation of San Francisco in the early millenium by Silicon Valley, critically acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg describe the complex interactions that make up a living, creative, diverse city. One of our most impassioned and acclaimed chroniclers of American urbanism, Rebecca Solnit explores the impact of skyrocketing rents, architectural homogenization, and the links between artists and gentrification. Wealth, she argues, is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty. Schwartzenberg's social documentary photographs work with Solnit's interlinked essays to memorialize San Francisco's vanishing spaces of civic memory and public life. Both a portrait of an acute crisis and a call to defend collective public life, Hollow City makes a fervent case for the imaginative potential of cities. Reporting from the frontlines of gentrification in San Francisco's Mission District, Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg deplore the skyrocketing rents and corporate buyouts that may be coming soon to a neighborhood near you. Reporting from the frontlines of gentrification in San Francisco's Mission District, the author deplores the skyrocketing rents and corporate buy-outs that may be coming soon to a neighbourhood near you Describes the displacement of the art and lifestyles of many of San Francisco's inhabitants by the economic boom and wealthy newcomers.