Reporting from the front line of gentrification in San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit examines the consequences when artists’ love for space and authenticity in working-class areas, and rich peoples’ love for the fashionable bohemia of artists’ neighbourhoods, are combined. The Mission, for instance, with its easier access to Silicon Valley, has become a standoff between high tech’s nouveaux riches and existing residents under threat from spiralling rents, including supporters of the Yuppie Eradication Project who advocate vandalizing expensive cars and restaurants in retaliation.

Solnit is rueful about the decision by cities like San Francisco to increase their admission charges so that poor people, artists, and writers like herself can no longer afford to live in the inner city. Drawing on architectural history, contemporary urban studies, and vivid first-hand description, and enriched by the telling images of Susan Schwartzenberg, a photographer who weaves together her own work with older pictures to create complex portraits of place. Hollow City projects the end of city life for bohemians and its baleful consequences for American culture.

“Passionate, potent, and to the point, Solnit's polemic embodies American political and social writing at its best.” – Publishers Weekly

“A place for artists, activists, and working folks: that's what made San Francisco the great city it is. Or was. The city we love is disappearing almost overnight and turning into just another sector of corporate monoculture. This is a terrific book, a passionate collaboration of word and image that surveys the rich urban culture we are losing.” – Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J. Peters, City Lights Books

“Hollow City, with its writing as lucid as a clear-flowing stream and its persuasive array of imges in decisively brilliant design, lays out just how the 80s and 90s put the real life of the city under siege.” – Martha Rosler

“Solnit’s mind is fertile, wide-ranging, and capable of integrating the bewildering deluge of fact, political delusion, flights of genius, inconceivable danger and cunning deceit . . .” — Los Angeles Times

“A writer of startling freshness and precision.” — New York Times

Rebecca Solnit, a resident of San Francisco for twenty years, lives in a rent-controlled apartment in San Francisco. An environmental activist and former art critic, she writes about place, environment and culture for Harvard Design Magazine, Sierra and Art Issues, among other publications. She is the author of Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Secret Exhibitions: Six California Artists of the Cold War Era, Savage Dreams, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, A Book of Migrations, and Wanderlust: A History of Walking.

Urban archaeologist and artist Susan Schwartzenberg is the author of the critically acclaimed Market Street, a visual study of San Francisco's main artery, as well as photo-essays in several books, including Reclaiming San Francisco.

 Publication
Cloth: Jan. 2001
Paper: Feb. 2002

188 pages
50 b/w photographs


Paper
1 85984 363 8
US$20 / £12 / CAN$29