Seeing Green in San Francisco: City as Resource Frontier

The early 21st century witnessed a boom in green building in San Francisco and similar cities. Major downtown property owners and investors retrofitted office towers, commissioned green certification, and critically, explored how greening might pay. Greening initiatives transcend corporate social responsibility: they represent a new attempt to enclose and speculate upon “green” value within the second nature of cities. However, this unconventional resource discovery requires a highly partial view of buildings’ socio‐natural entanglements in and beyond the city. I illuminate these efforts and their obscurities by exploring the experience of an exemplary green building in San Francisco, an office tower that has successively served as a headquarters organizing a vast resource periphery in the American West, a symbol and driver in the transformation of the city's own second nature, a financial “resource” in its own right, and most recently, an asset in an emerging global market for green property.     

旧金山渔人码头 活色生香的海边集市

正有人说,要想游览旧金山就要抛开汽车,健壮的小腿和公共汽车票足矣。这话不假,我在美国旧金山的几天里几乎都是步行,而去的最多的地方就是渔人码头。渔人码头是旧金山的一个著名旅游景点,范围大致包括从旧金山北部水域哥拉德利广场Ghirardelli Square到35号码头一带,许多商场、购物中心和特色餐馆都坐落在这一地区,给游客提供了吃喝玩乐的一条龙服务。渔人码头是旧金山的象征之一,原是意大利渔民聚集的渔港,到了1960年代,由于捕获量减少,逐渐演变成了今天的观光景点。看到这个圆形的大螃蟹广告牌,你就到     

From collinearity to structure: San Francisco and Pittsburgh, 1860

The author argues that giving a name to any period of history is a complicated process for historians, requiring careful consideration of many factors. Applying the extensive presence and use of computers as an example of the process at work, he suggests that it may be too early to name our time the information age.     

Women's and Children's Quarters in Golden Gate Park,San Francisco

This paper explores the mythic domesticity encoded in the Children's Quarter in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco. The play area, opened in 1888, represented a new genre of gender-specific public space developed in urban parks in the late nineteenth century. In welcoming women to the public domain of the urban park, gendered spaces such as the Children's Quarter signified a complex response to changing class and gender identities in the nineteenth-century city. Imposing a domestic structure on women's public presence, the Children's Quarter modeled a middle-class domestic ideal, affirming women's essential association with the private sphere even as it welcomed them to the public sphere of the urban park.     

旧金山之美

<正>彩虹飞架大洋岸,巨龙衔起两青山;西海波涛连天际,东湾碧水映白帆。红桥出浴晚霞天,轻纱薄雾彩云端;三藩景色多妖娆,金门桥头最好看。如果你还活着,旧金山不会使你厌烦;如果你已经死了,那旧金山会让你再度起死回生。     

Embodying Place: Pathologizing Chinese and Chinatown in Nineteenth-Century San Francisco

This paper argues for uniting disease with body theories in investigations of power relations and the construction of race. It examines this alliance through the case studies of smallpox and syphilis in nineteenth century San Francisco. In locating epidemics inside the Chinese community and by reproducing Chinese bodies as intrinsically diseased, medical theories explaining smallpox and syphilis succeeded in shifting dominant constructions of race from different to pathological. But the process of body production and the role of disease in it cannot be divorced from a simultaneous analysis of the production of place. The configuration of Chinatown's streets and alleyways, perceptions of filth and crowding, and the bodies resident within Chinatown were simultaneously pathologized in a process that exemplifies the need for a better integration of body theories with theories of the social production of place.     

Infrastructural Activism: Google Bus Blockades,Affective Politics,and Environmental Gentrification in San Francisco

Between 2013 and 2018, the San Francisco Bay Area saw the rise of “Google bus blockades”—a form of protest against gentrification, growing inequality and a housing crisis linked to the economic impacts of the technology sector on the region. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with housing activists in the San Francisco Bay Area, this article argues that the disruptive tactic of “the Google Bus blockade” can be understood as a form of infrastructural activism—a flexible political form that uses the interruption of infrastructure for political ends. The blockades politicised the “Google buses” and transformed them into symbols of gentrification and sites of resistance. Protestors constructed a political analysis that drew connections between struggles for housing, racial and environmental justice and brought together material, affective and political critiques of infrastructure.     

Between Mumford And Marx: Anatomising Imperial San Francisco

The practice of restoration ecology (the creation and restoration of ecosystems) has important implications for theorizing nature in the traditions of O'Connor's 'capitalized nature,' Haraway's hybrid socionatures, and other recent work in poststructural approaches to political ecology. The prominent US environmental discourse of 'no net loss of wetlands' has spurred the rapid expansion of restoration practices, which promise to open a new frontier in the commodification and capitalization of nature. Through wetland mitigation and banking, restoration science is representing entire ecosystems as abstract, mobile, and fungible entities; however, a simple reading of a restored landscape as fully capitalized is unsatisfactory. Close attention to the wetland commodification process reveals two important points: 1) the commodification and capitalization of nature is never automatic; rather, the crucial steps of abstraction and valuation are composed of negotiations between and within differentiated segments of the state and civil society, in which there are many spaces for resistance; and 2) the materiality of restoration sites provided important challenges to the commodification process, which are not contemplated within critical approaches to nature as currently constituted. The transformation of restoration sites into sites of commodity provision is incomplete at best. A major challenge for poststructural political ecology will be to specify ecological phenomena and their important role in the social construction of material environments, without falling into an ontological commitment to the primacy of ecological data.     

The Spaces of Parking: Mapping the Politics of Mobility in San Francisco

Abstract:  Recently a "mobility turn" has entered critical geographic discourse. This mobility turn recognizes that mobility is at once physical movement and contains social meanings that are manifested in a politics of mobility. In this paper I contribute to this emerging line of inquiry by exploring how the politics of mobility is manifested in localized urban processes. Mobility, as with the broader localized urban process, is political and ideological, and this is particularly true with contemporary debates about automobiles and parking in cities. I explore parking as an example of the broader contestation of urban space, using a case study of San Francisco, California. There are three broad factions in San Francisco's parking debates—progressives that advocate for less parking, neoliberals that advocate that market-based pricing determine the amount of parking, and neoconservatives that advocate for more parking. Throughout the paper, I provide thoughts on the relationship between parking, space, ideology, and the broader urban process.