Infinite City - BookWyrm

Paperback, 157 pages

English language

Published Dec. 19, 2010 by University of California Press.

ISBN:: 978-0-520-26250-8

(1 review)

"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, culture and history in one locale, the San Francisco Bay Area. Aided by artists, writers and cartographers, Solnit has compiled twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates San Francisco and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants..." (From the paperback jacket.)

1 edition

The Beach Reader reviewed Infinite City by Rebecca Solnit

Review of 'Infinite City' on 'Goodreads'

5 stars

A wonderful companion to Los Angeles in Maps; I met the authors of both books at this year's LA Times Festival of Books. This book, like the city it describes, is much more fanciful than the Los Angeles volume. These maps were all custom-created for this book, so there's a wonderful unity of design here. The maps are confrontational in what they choose to depict. In "The Right Wing of the Dove," S.F is shown to be a central hub of the machinery of death and war. In another map, 500 "Ellis Act" evictions are pinpointed; each dot represents a person, usually poor and older, forcibly ejected from one of the most beautiful cities on earth in order to make way for gentrification. In another, the shorelines of the aboriginal past, the land-filled present, and the inundated future are shown overlapping. The swamps of the past will return through global …

A wonderful companion to Los Angeles in Maps; I met the authors of both books at this year's LA Times Festival of Books. This book, like the city it describes, is much more fanciful than the Los Angeles volume. These maps were all custom-created for this book, so there's a wonderful unity of design here. The maps are confrontational in what they choose to depict. In "The Right Wing of the Dove," S.F is shown to be a central hub of the machinery of death and war. In another map, 500 "Ellis Act" evictions are pinpointed; each dot represents a person, usually poor and older, forcibly ejected from one of the most beautiful cities on earth in order to make way for gentrification. In another, the shorelines of the aboriginal past, the land-filled present, and the inundated future are shown overlapping. The swamps of the past will return through global climate change.

It's not all doom and gloom, though. There's maps of the salmon runs of the Bay Area, of the local butterfly species and queer culture landmarks. Almost every map has a strange juxtaposition. Sometimes these try a bit too hard, but I was glad to see them all.

One negative -- this book is too tightly bound to show off the maps to their best advantage. That's increasingly annoying as you make your way through the book. The gutter eats a lot of the map. Would've been easy to fix with the proper binding; not sure why they didn't choose to do so.