The Map Room

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas
by Rebecca Solnit
University of California Press, 2010. Hardcover and paperback, 164 pp.
ISBN 978-0-520-26249-2 (hardcover); 978-0-520-26250-8 (paperback)

Not every city has a soul: some are decidedly soulless. But while I’ve never been to San Francisco, it seems to me that it, at least, is one that does. Cities like that can be magical places: they don’t just have histories, but mythologies, too. “This atlas is a valentine of sorts to a complex place,” Rebecca Solnit writes in the acknowledgements to Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, itself a complex and many-layered book. The 22 maps and accompanying essays, by divers cartographers, artists and writers, depict a San Francisco with a layered history, and in many ways is a record of a city that has been lost to history. The San Francisco in these maps is a palimpsest, the city repeatedly overwritten, maps and histories overlaying one another.

A key strategy employed by the artists and cartographers in Infinite City is to display two things on the same map — sometimes complementary, sometimes contrasting: drag queens and butterflies, murders and cypresses (“death and beauty”), zen centers and salmon rivers. The accompanying essays make the case for these combinations.

Though invariably artful and beautiful, the cartography is frequently not much to write home about. Some of the maps are of the labels-and-dots variety, and could, at least from a cartographical perspective, be rendered equally well in Google Maps, though the result wouldn’t nearly be as visually appealing.

The maps that stood out in my mind were those that departed from the standard template: “Third Street Phantom Coast” (#10) compares the pre-1849 and 2010 shorelines (among other things); “Graveyard Shift” (#11) shows the now-lost industrial and port sector of the city; “Once and Future Waters” (#22) takes the 1850 landmass and compares it to where the sea levels will be in 2100 if the sea level rises 1.5 metres. Some venture toward art: a phrenological map (#19) and a treasure map (#21). “The Mission” (#13) superimposes the U.S.-Mexico border on a map of the Mission District that includes gang territories.

But the strength in this book is in the essays, which is a strange thing to say about an atlas, particularly in a review on a map blog. Above all else, Infinite City is about telling San Francisco’s stories — using both narratives and maps to do so. The maps aren’t at all scientific or demographic; there are no cartograms or choropleths, and no GIS appears to have been harmed in their making. They tell tales — idiosyncratic tales, comprising an unconventional book.

I received a review copy of this book.

Previously: Infinite City: A “Fanciful” Atlas of San Francisco; LA Times Reviews Infinite City; Radio Interview About Infinite City.

• Buy Infinite City (hardcover) at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)
• Buy Infinite City (paperback) at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Listen to an interview with Rebecca Solnit about her book, Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas, from 99% Invisible, a program on public radio station KALW. (Yes, my review is still coming.)

Previously: LA Times Reviews Infinite City; Infinite City: A “Fanciful” Atlas of San Francisco.

• Buy Infinite City at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

The Los Angeles Times has a review of Rebecca Solnit’s Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas.

“Infinite City” examines that San Francisco, a physically compact place that contains multitudes, through a series of elegantly rendered maps and cleverly researched and well-wrought essays conceived by more than a dozen writers, cartographers and artists. … They collectively, and intricately, render the 47-square-mile-city in 22 maps that glimpse the city through the prisms of politics, ideology, agriculture, social justice, film, counterculture, toxic dumps, shipyards, industry, the Wild West of identity (ethnic, sexual) and more.

I have a copy in hand; with any luck a review will be coming soon.

Previously: Infinite City: A “Fanciful” Atlas of San Francisco.

• Buy Infinite City at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Spatial Analysis’s roundup of typographical maps — that is, maps made entirely of textual elements — includes Axis Maps’s typographic map of San Francisco (above) and Stephen Walter’s incredible hand-drawn map of Liverpool. Via @worldmapper.

Previously: Typographic Maps of Boston and Chicago.

San Francisco Public Press covers the launch of Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas by Rebecca Solnit. “The collection of fanciful maps of the city combines disparate but creatively juxtaposed items such as World War II shipyards and African-American political and musical landmarks,” says the article. “The book is part of a project started as a collaboration for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s 75th anniversary celebration.” From the publisher: “Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place.”

Updated 12/02.

• Buy Infinite City at Amazon.com (Canada, UK)

Here’s something a little different from a heat map: Doug McCune has plotted crime in San Francisco as though it were elevation, creating these and other interesting three-dimensional maps in which high elevation means high incidence of a given…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Burrito Justice imagines San Francisco if its neighbourhoods were islands and its streets canals, in this diagrammatic map of the city….  •  Continue reading this entry.

Eric Fischer took publicly available data from the Muni — the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency — showing the geographic coordinates of their vehicles to create this map showing average transit speeds over a 24-hour period. “Black is less…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Rachel Berger compares BART’s new, geometric system map with its wigglier, geographically accurate antecedent, providing the now-familiar (for those of us following the debates on subway system map design) context from other cities’ subway systems. Honestly, I’m not sure…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Via MAPS-L, a noise map of San Francisco (PDF) from the city’s public health department. Previously: Simon Elvins’s “Silent London”; London Noise Map; Noise Map of Paris….  •  Continue reading this entry.

The San Francisco Solar Map is a part of the city’s goal to have 10,000 roofs equipped with solar panels by 2012; it maps current solar installations and provides information for those interested in installing solar panels. Via Vector One;…  •  Continue reading this entry.

BART, the San Francisco Bay area rapid transit network, is getting new network maps, SF Weekly reports. The new maps will, in the words of a BART spokesman, “have more straight lines” in the idiom of other, diagrammatic maps of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

The big news so far from Where 2.0 is the announcement of Google’s street-level imagery for five U.S. cities — Denver, Las Vegas, Miami, New York and (of course) San Francisco — which, in a fit of originality, they’re…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Some more material about updating road data after disasters that I missed the first time around (and am only getting to now). Via Mapping Hacks, a San Francisco Chronicle article that discussed updating driving directions in the wake of…  •  Continue reading this entry.

This week has revealed a lot about how the online mapping sites respond to disasters that close major routes and affect driving directions. Within two days of the MacArthur Maze freeway collapse in Oakland, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and MapQuest…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Alberto has uploaded a collection of microfilm copies of San Francisco fire insurance maps dating from around 1905 — which wuld have been just before things got very interesting indeed from a fire perspective. The trouble with microform copies…  •  Continue reading this entry.

A 15-year-old Oakland high school student has, for a school internship project, created a map of Piedmont, California (a small city of 11,000 people completely surrounded by Oakland) “that shows not only the city’s streets but all its community amenities,…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Cabspotting, which went live on Thursday, generates a real-time map of taxi movements by displaying the last four hours of trips by GPS-equipped taxicabs in San Francisco. (For some reason this reminds me of the cell phone map of Graz…  •  Continue reading this entry.

Not exactly a map, but it’s close enough — it’s a city model, right? — and it’s cool: San Francisco in Jell-O (see also)….  •  Continue reading this entry.

If you’ve got an iPod with a colour screen, you can put subway maps on it. It’s a simple matter to put digital images on an iPod; where maps are concerned, though, it’s a challenge to make sure they’re legible…  •  Continue reading this entry.