the geographical review

milieu but that questions about what it means, how it influences the dynamics ofcity life, and how it is lived out in everyday life-worlds are left for other scholars toexplore. Geographically informed studies of congregational life, mapping ofchurch-sheds, comparative studies of other cities, and explorations of religious lifein the megachurches and temples of the outer suburban frontier are importantnext steps. Hopefully, this book will be the impetus for geographers to open theireyes to the place of religion in the city and take up this challenge.Mark Bjelland,Gustavus Adolphus College

INFINITE CITY: A San Francisco Atlas. By Rebecca Solnit. vii and pp.;maps, ills. Berkeley, University of California Press, . . (cloth),

; . (paper); .

Cultural geographers describe “sense of place” as the intimate, personal, and emo-tional experience with a locale or region and consider place as meaningful ratherthan as an abstraction in space. Critical geographers, in contrast, examines howspatial arrangement and representations in specific places serve and reproduceinequality and oppression and considers how space and place can be both toolsand veils of power. In Infinite City: An Atlas of San Francisco, Rebecca Solnit synthe-sizes cultural and critical geographic inquiry into a readable, accessible, and visu-ally stimulating collection of maps and narratives about one of the nation’s mostdiverse metropolitan areas. She admits that the work is a love poem and celebra-tion of a city she adores, but she is also quick to peel away the layers and expose thedark contradictions and flaws in her city. This makes Infinite City both a romanticvalentine and a candid, critical introspection.

Divided into twenty-two chapters, each accompanied by a colorful full-pagemap, Infinite City pulls together twenty-nine diverse contributors with differentand sometimes conflicting story lines about San Francisco. In the introductionSolnit explains how atlases are a collection of perceptions or versions of place andthen outlines how the atlas playfully combines various disparate topics and themesfrom different viewpoints that produce not twenty-two or forty-four versions ofSan Francisco but an inexhaustible array of “infinite” perspectives on the city.However, she cautions, people’s ability to absorb information is not infinite, somaps are selective and based on the mapmaker’s own desires or questions aboutplace.

Despite her emphasis that maps can be deeply arbitrary renderings, InfiniteCity does, I think, flesh out some important considerations about place in geo-graphical thought. Most notable is that this atlas illustrates how place can be atonce politically progressive and conservative, can be multicultural and outward-looking while also insular and exclusive, can be dynamic and connected in a glob-alizing world while also isolating, limiting belonging and attachment. In that veinseveral of the maps stand out.

In one of the boldest maps, the “Right Wing of the Dove” the Bay Area’s leftistpolitical history is juxtaposed against a long, complicated local history tangled

geographical reviews

with politically conservative think tanks such as the Hoover Institution at StanfordUniversity. Solnit calls that institute the brains of the military machine, alludingto tech workers who are building missile-guidance systems at Lockheed or cob-bling together nefarious surveillance systems at in downtown San Francisco.Though home to the nation’s largest military disembarkation complex, Travis AirForce Base (in the northern suburbs), which distributes soldiers and cargo tobattlefronts in Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bay Area also exports a politics of peace,fair trade, and green consumerism. A similar map, “Poison Palate,” highlights thecontradiction of the Bay Area as the intellectual center of high-tech corporationsthat are engaged in genetic modification of crops while also acting as the breadbas-ket of the local organic foods movement. The city, Solnit observes, is at once thedeck of the Starship Enterprise and a Tuscan villa.

One of the key points Solnit makes in Infinite City is that local contradictionsmay not be resolved but must be recognized. She does not offer a way to expel themilitary-industrial complex or bioengineered food from the Bay Area, but shedoes force the reader to confront myths and engage in “truth to power.” In an-other piercing map with that slogan, she outlines the complex political tangle ofSan Francisco’s idealistic Civic Center buildings, juxtaposing iconic monumentalBeaux Arts buildings against the disgrace of homelessness, mental illness, and al-coholism, pointing out that the young, idealistic city workers must navigate pov-erty and a failing economic structure during their commute and lunch hours. Inher mapping Solnit also acknowledges her own paradox of place, describing howshe was at the leading edge of the white gentrification of the Lower Haight in thes, which was a predominately black, working-class section of the FillmoreDistrict.

Indeed, some of the best maps are homages to the bygone industrial era of SanFrancisco. Among them is “Shipyards and Sounds,” which traces the relationshipbetween war industries, black migration, and the evolution of San Francisco’scontribution to jazz. Another reference to deindustrialization, and probably thebest single map in the book, traces the city’s “Phantom Coast,” an excellent map ofthe old industrial waterfront with a detailed plotting of the city’s historic food-processing agglomeration, shipbuilding, and other manufacturing that once domi-nated the eastern neighborhoods. Ironically, this part of San Francisco is nowhome to a new “off-the-grid,” “do-it-yourself ” cultural movement centered oncraft production and gourmet foods, but is this really a new transformative move-ment that can find a political voice? Or is it just a reflection of wealthy tech-workerboredom? In this case the atlas proffers questions but has no definitive answers.

On the map of the Mission, Solnit and her collaborators excluded reference tothe hyperhipsterization and gentrification of this iconic neighborhood and in-stead provide the most humane and explicit sense of place in the atlas, providing agripping ethnographic expose of the Mission gang culture alongside Latino day-laborer assembly sites. The chapter that asks what is in a cup of coffee providesanother good map, stressing the importance of the water system for coffee produc-

the geographical review

tion, an infrastructure often taken for granted and yet another way in which con-sumers are alienated from consumption.

Overall the maps are largely well crafted and often beautiful, and the bookstimulates further investigation of the city, but it has one critical omission: cita-tions. The work contains many strong claims and arguments, and yet even a fellowtraveler such as myself wishes to see these claims backed with evidence. This seemsespecially appropriate for an atlas. Although Infinite City does a good job of invit-ing the reader to learn more, it does not provide even the scantiest footnotes,endnotes, or bibliographical references, so it sometimes feels like a frustrating cul-de-sac of factoids without backup.

Footnotes aside, as a critical sense of place, Infinite City joins the ranks of arobust place-based literature on the Bay Area, complementing scholarly works byJames Brook, Chris Carlsson, and Nancy Peters (Reclaiming San Francisco: History,Politics, Culture []), Gray Brechin (Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, EarthlyRuin []), Chester Hartman, with Sarah Carnochan (City for Sale: The Trans-formation of San Francisco []), and Richard Walker (Country in the City: TheGreening of the San Francisco Bay Area []). It would obviously make a goodaddition to a course on Bay Area or California urban geography; but beyond theBay Area this work should inspire readers, as Solnit suggests, to consider thatevery place needs an atlas, and her work hopefully stimulates other place-basedscholars to consider how to both celebrate and critically deconstruct their placesthrough mapmaking. The volume could also be incorporated into a broader up-per-level undergraduate urban geography course emphasizing sense of place, per-haps as a supplemental reading rather than as a key text. For example, studentscould use the atlas as a template for conducting their own local mapping of place,for it compels the reader to ask, “What maps would I make?”—Jason Henderson,San Francisco State University