Review of 'Designing San Francisco : art, land, and urban renewal in the City by the Bay' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
This is a tough book for me to assess. On the one hand, it added some real and interesting depth to parts of the city’s development I knew less about, especially around some parts of the waterfront. It also fleshed out some very interesting characters, with a focus on women, which is too rare. And perhaps most intriguingly it tried to articulate a very interesting thesis about how design and non-design disciplines worked together to build modern SF.
But ultimately I found the thesis ill-supported, or maybe ill-articulated, or both - even while reading it, and certainly afterward, I could not quite concisely capture what the author was trying to say, and it’s hard to say the evidence (rather than the artfully-chosen anecdote) actually supported it in anything but the most obvious way. (Yes, PR people were involved! Activists were involved!) So hard for me to love the book as …
This is a tough book for me to assess. On the one hand, it added some real and interesting depth to parts of the city’s development I knew less about, especially around some parts of the waterfront. It also fleshed out some very interesting characters, with a focus on women, which is too rare. And perhaps most intriguingly it tried to articulate a very interesting thesis about how design and non-design disciplines worked together to build modern SF.
But ultimately I found the thesis ill-supported, or maybe ill-articulated, or both - even while reading it, and certainly afterward, I could not quite concisely capture what the author was trying to say, and it’s hard to say the evidence (rather than the artfully-chosen anecdote) actually supported it in anything but the most obvious way. (Yes, PR people were involved! Activists were involved!) So hard for me to love the book as much as I wanted to.