Hollow City surveys San Francisco’s
transformation—skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that
are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit organizations and the
poor; the homogenization of the city’s architecture, industries and
population; the decay of its public life; and the erasure of its
sites of civic memory.
California’s Bay Area is home to nearly a third of the venture
capital and internet businesses in the United States, generating a
boom economy and a massive influx of well-paid workers that has
transformed the face of San Francisco. Once the great anomaly among
American cities, San Francisco is today only the most dramatically
affected among the many urban centers experiencing cultural
impoverishment as a result of new forms and distributions of wealth.
A collaboration
between writer-hiostorian Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan
Schwartzenberg, Hollow City surveys San Francisco’s
transformation—skyrocketing residential and commercial rents that
are driving out artists, activists, nonprofit organizations and the
poor; the homogenization of the city’s architecture, industries and
population; the decay of its public life; and the erasure of its
sites of civic memory.
Written as a tour of
the city’s distinctive characters and locales, Solnit’s text
grounds the current evictions in earlier histories of urban renewal
and the economic geography of artists, from Haussmann’s impact on
the Paris of Baudelaire, to the relationship between the Beats and
San Francisco’s African-American community during ‘negro removal’
of the 1950s. She investigates the ways wealth is now clear-cutting
the cultural richness of American urban life, erasing space for
idealism, dissent, memory and vulnerable populations.
Schwartzenberg’s
photo-essays document the profusion of construction and demolition
projects in the city, the imperial spaces of dot-com businesses, the
proliferation of retail chains, and the rapid disappearance of areas
in which artists can live and create. They feature works by more than
a dozen San Francisco artists.