Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance

by Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Ananya Roy (Foreword), Chris Carlsson (Foreword)

A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance brings together cartography, essays, illustrations, poetry, and more in order to depict gentrification and resistance struggles from across the San Francisco Bay Area and act as a roadmap to counter-hegemonic knowledge making and activism. Compiled by the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, each chapter reflects different frameworks for understanding the Bay Area’s ongoing urban upheaval, evictions and root shock, indigenous geographies, health and environmental racism, state violence, transportation and infrastructure, migration and relocation, and speculative futures. By weaving these themes together, Counterpoints expands normative urban-studies framings of gentrification to consider more complex, regional, historically grounded, and entangled horizons for understanding the present. Understanding the tech boom and its effects means looking beyond San Francisco’s borders to consider the region as a socially, economically, and politically interconnected whole and reckoning with the area’s deep history of displacement, going back to its first moments of settler colonialism. Counterpoints combines work from within the project with contributions from community partners, from longtime community members who have been fighting multiple waves of racial dispossession to elementary school youth envisioning decolonial futures. In this way, Counterpoints is a collaborative, co-created atlas aimed at expanding knowledge on displacement and resistance in the Bay Area with, rather than for or about, those most impacted.

Genres: Nonfiction, Cities, Maps

432 pages, Paperback

Published August 17, 2021

Reviews

[Derek Ouyang · Rating 3 out of 5]

First, for a book purportedly about the "decolonizing" power of maps, it surprisingly featured mostly the kinds of maps I'd expect out of an intro to GIS course, using the most capitalist of GIS software. Second, for a book purportedly itself an "atlas of resistance", it often resisted my earnest attempt to navigate through what often felt like a patchwork of poorly formatted feature layers (Chapter 5, on infrastructure, stands out as cohesive and substantive, I think in large part due to its more consolidated, professional authorship).

Throughout, I struggled to articulate in my mind the essential flaw of the effort beyond the pithy dismissal of being too "social justice-y", until the book led me to Eureka after all: the chosen ending is a collection of playful poems by kids in an elementary school class, about obsessions that matter to them (ranging from Yu-Gi-Oh to dog poop), patched into their collective vision for a future San Francisco garnished with fancifully renamed streets. It struck me as a perfect mirror for the project, and to some degree this corner of scholarship, which suffers from a generally childish approach, by which I mean not that things are being explained for children, but that serious stories, issues, and ideas are being understood through the most elementary of playground principles. The raw, rich substance of this project deserves to be less flattened in black vs. white, more intricately rendered in spectrum.

[Nils Jepson · Rating 5 out of 5]

essential analysis of place-making, place-taking, and dispossession throughout the Bay Area. really contextualized displacement and gentrification within larger histories. kinda a bible for how to how to move beyond private property and towards radical futures. really, really enlightening and illuminates the types of questions that we (mostly young, educated, middle-class folks) need to be asking of the places we live in!!