Pictures of a Gone City

Description

The San Francisco Bay Area is currently the jewel in the crown of capitalism—the tech capital of the world and a gusher of wealth from the Silicon Gold Rush. It has been generating jobs, spawning new innovation, and spreading ideas that are changing lives everywhere. It boasts of being the Left Coast, the Greenest City, and the best place for workers in the USA.

So what could be wrong? It may seem that the Bay Area has the best of it in Trump’s America, but there is a dark side of success: overheated bubbles and spectacular crashes; exploding inequality and millions of underpaid workers; a boiling housing crisis, mass displacement, and severe environmental damage; a delusional tech elite and complicity with the worst in American politics.

In this session of Learning Club, Richard Walker will join us for a discussion of his book, Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This sweeping account of the Bay Area in the age of the tech boom covers many bases. It begins with the phenomenal concentration of IT in Greater Silicon Valley, the fabulous economic growth of the bay region and the unbelievable wealth piling up for the 1% and high incomes of Upper Classes—in contrast to the fate of the working class and people of color earning poverty wages and struggling to keep their heads above water. The middle chapters survey the urban scene, including the greatest housing bubble in the United States, a metropolis exploding in every direction, and a geography turned inside out. Lastly, it hits the environmental impact of the boom, the fantastical ideology of TechWorld, and the political implications of the tech-led transformation of the bay region.

Materials

• City at Work: Making and Fighting for a Living, (Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area by Richard Walker, Chapter 4)
• Capitalist Development in the San Francisco Bay Area (Against the Grain, KPFA)
• The Bay Area's economic boom: who's been left behind? (Your Call, KALW)

Additional Resources

• Only Connect: A Review of Richard Walker’s Pictures of a Gone City (The Brooklyn Rail)
• Why Is There a Housing Crisis? (East Bay Express)
• In ‘Gone City,’ geographer questions Silicon Valley’s boom times (Berkeley News)