What 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 include: 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
and Sunaura Taylor; Writers and researchers - Summer
Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad,
Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La
Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin,
Heather Smith and Richard Walker; and, Additional
cartography - Darin Jensen, Robin Grossinger and Ruth
Askevold, as well as San Francisco Estuary
Institute. |
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