Some indicators of California's prosperity aren't looking so hot right now: population loss; budget deficits; corporate exoduses; political marginalization; and the departure of the A's. And yet, despite -- or perhaps because of -- these challenges, scholarship on and commentary about California urbanism is more robust than ever. CP&DR's bookshelf has overflowed lately with titles from the past two years. Collectively, they offer a compelling account of the state we're in.
The Bay Area
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If you're a tech financier or ace programmer Palo Alto, and the surrounding Silicon Valley, is probably one of the best places in the world. Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World is also the best book about California to come out in quite some time -- but not for the reasons the tech folks might like. Author Malcom Harris has a serious axe to grind with a place that loves to idealize itself. Starting with the founding of Stanford University by scoundrel/robber baron/governor Leland Stanford and extending through the present era of the FAANGs now middle-aged multibillionaires, Palo Alto offers both a detailed history of the region and a commentary on the cloistered exuberance, antisocial tendencies, and insane wealth that an otherwise unremarkable urban area has fostered. In the hands of a lesser writer, Palo Alto might be too tedious to get its point across; instead, Harris is wry, pointed, and is as cynical as many technologists are oblivious.
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As much as many technologists would prefer to live in the cloud, the metaverse, or the back alleys of Github, the terrestrial world is still very much with us -- often to harrowing effect. We have one of the history's greatest object lessons in geomorphology and landscape-based peril in, of course, the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906. The Longest Minute: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906 performs some time travel to describe the earthquake, its aftermath, and recovery in the several months following April 18, 1906, in riveting detail. It declines, however, to investigate the myriad ways the disaster gave rise to contemporary San Francisco, leaving readers familiar with the city to make their own inferences.
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In Portal: San Francisco's Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities. John King, the longtime (and recently retired) architecture critic for the San Francisco Chronicle, makes a persuasive argument for how one building can, even someplace as dynamic as San Francisco, capture the soul of a city. The Ferry Building was one of the city's grandest public spaces when it opened in 1898 to serve cross-bay commuters. It thrived through 1936, until the great automobile bridges rendered it largely obsolete. Having decayed in the post-World War II decades, the Ferry Building has reemerged as a pleasant marketplace and, as a ever, an architectural focal point. Meanwhile, A People's History of SFO is, historically speaking, a fitting complement to Portal. San Francisco International Airport connects the Bay Area to the world and is, therefore, a powerful force in promoting global capitalism. But, it's also a problematic local institution, clashing with indigenous peoples and vulnerable to sea level rise.
Los Angeles
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The founders of Silicon Valley did not necessarily want to create a great city. They mainly wanted to get rich. The founders of Los Angeles, though no strangers to human frailties, were arguably more ambitious. Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles covers much the same time period as Palo Alto does, but in a vastly different location. Author and amateur L.A. historian Paul Haddad traces the intersecting careers of the six city fathers who he assigns credit for turning Los Angeles from a dusty frontier town to a major metropolis. From their ambitions sprang the region's port; its major newspaper; its waterworks; its rail transit system; and countless real estate schemes that, while not entirely shady, illustrate what every planner knows: cities do not build themselves.
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Renewing the Dream: The Mobility Revolution and the Future of Los Angeles is an appealing coffee-table book that attempts to generate excitement for a new version of Los Angeles. It largely succeeds. Through essays, photo essays, diagrams, and interviews, editor James Sanders makes a convincing argument that Los Angeles' best days are ahead of it. Though the book is partly a promotional piece for Australia-based architecture firm Woods Bagot, of which Sanders is CEO, it includes contributions from Los Angeles heavy-hitters including journalist Frances Anderton, UCLA planning professors Michael Manville and Don Shoup, and author Greg Lindsay.
Housing
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Veteran design critic Frances Anderton lovingly celebrates an often reviled, or at least disregarded, housing typology -- multifamily structures (i.e. apartment buildings) -- in Common Ground. She digs into historical designs, like the early 20th century bungalow court, which was a casualty of parking requirements, and she highlights recent innovative designs that enable Angelenos to live both densely and graciously. Anderton's crucial thesis is that, to both solve its housing crisis and become more neighborly, Los Angeles must stop stigmatizing multifamily living and embrace innovative, atheistically pleasing possibilities.
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Abolish Rent is a brief polemic by activists Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis, co-founders of the Los Angeles Tenants Union. They take aim at property owners, landlords, the American financial system, or much of anything else about the American system of land ownership. The most moving elements of Abolish Rent describe the plight of low-income tenants exploited by negligent and sometimes antagonistic landlords. Unfortunately, Abolish Rent is more combative than productive. Its woefully small-scale solution is for renters to mount protests and rent strikes to compel landlords to behave properly. The macro-level solution they ignore is the need to build more housing so that, among other salubrious effects, tenants have more freedom of choice and, therefore, landlords lose much of the coercive power that Rosenthal and Vilchis (rightfully) resent. (See related CP&DR coverage.)
Wilderness
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The Ghost Forest takes us out of California's cities and into what was once, arguably, the greatest hardwood forest the Earth has ever known. The early chapters ignite a firestorm of anger and regret. The great redwoods, now confined to a few patches in along the north coast, used to dominate the coastal ranges north of the San Francisco Bay. A single tree -- dense, wide, and impossibly tall--could yield more lumber than 10 acres of new-growth pine trees. That's how majestic they were, and that's why nearly all of them were cut down in the 20th century to build cities and suburbs. In Ghost Forest, environmental activist and lifelong North Coast resident Greg King recounts the history of logging, the logging companies' modern-day conspiracies to control land and quell dissent, and the dogged movements to protect what little old-growth remains. King's account is probably excessively detailed for such a dramatic story. Even so, The Ghost Forest is an important, chilling, loving lament for California's lost natural history.
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Try as we might, though, humanity, and Californians, has proven to be no match for wildfires. California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What it Means for America's Power Grid tells the tragically parallel stories of California's recent wildfires and the company responsible for causing many of them: Pacific Gas & Electric -- the largest of California's six investor-owned utilities. Journalist Katherine Blunt explains, with admirable clarity, how mismanagement of a venerable company mixed with climate change, drought, and exurban development to result in the immolation of millions of acres. Beyond the fire-related drama, it's a crucial look at a utility deeply intertwined with life in California and a tragedy that portends tough times in California as property insurers balk and formerly buildable land on the edge of wilderness becomes perilous. (See related CP&DR coverage.)
The Coast
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Perhaps fittingly, the Los Angeles region's greatest waterside institution is decidedly more frivolous than those of San Francisco. Likewise, Santa Monica Pier: America's Last Great Pleasure Pier is not a work of serious criticism or historical inquiry but rather a collection of historical photos and anecdotes. The Santa Monica Pier was originally one of nearly a dozen "pleasure piers" that reached out into the Santa Monica Bay. It was, arguably, the grandest, and it's the only only still standing. James Harris, who is the executive director of the nonprofit corporation that runs the pier today, recounts the pier's evolution and resiliency. Having been saved several times, the pier is a remarkable throwback and, though Harris doesn't say so outright, perhaps the state's most potent symbol of the relationship between city and ocean.
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Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles is worthwhile for the title alone, capturing the urge--mainly on the part of recent, and often thoughtless, newcomers--to alter and profit off of California's landscape. After the gold ran out, the beach took its place. The beach was not "discovered" in the early 1900s, of course. but, it was then that everyday Californians discovered its appeal en masse and promoters and developers attracted visitors in part by physically altering the coastline, adding sand and building lavish facilities like beach clubs and piers. Elisa Devienne's is a dense work of scholarship--written by a Briton, no less--so it's not as readable as its subject matter would suggest, but it's an important contribution to the history of one of the state's signature assets.
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One unfortunate truism about the future of California is that there may be less of it. In California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline, journalist Rosanna Xia reflects on how a dozen or so communities on California's edge--including urban areas like San Francisco and Manhattan beach and seaside hamlets like Bodega Bay and Point Dume -- relate to their respective beaches and coastlines and on the ways that the (rising) Pacific is washing away beaches and gnawing at bluffs. In many of these places, the future depends on seawalls, sand replenishment, sump pumps, and a new vision for California's coast. (See related CP&DR coverage.)
Everywhere
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Sam Hall Kaplan has seen a lot. He hung out with Jane Jacobs in Greenwich Village in the 1960s and wrote for an upstart media entrepreneur named Rupert Murdoch in the 1970s. The following decade, he set out for Los Angeles -- not for movie stardom, but for ever more articles to write, stories to cover, and characters to meet. The most important character Kaplan covered was the city of Los Angeles itself. An Urban Odyssey: A Critic’s Search for the Soul of Cities and Self is Kaplan's well earned celebration of his own career and an uncannily comprehensive history of planning and development in Los Angeles. Kaplan's chops as a beat reporter and objective observer are undeniable. But, he does not lack for opinions. In the 50 or so roughly chronological essays of An Urban Odyssey, Kaplan holds forth on the good, bad, and absurd in land use with a well earned authority.
Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles
Frances Anderton
Angel City Press
208 pages
California Burning: The Fall of Pacific Gas and Electric--and What it Means for America's Power Grid
Katherine Blunt
Portfolio
368 Pages
The Longest Minute: The Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire of 1906
Matthew J. Davenport
St. Martin's Press
448 Pages
Sand Rush: The Revival of the Beach in Twentieth-Century Los Angeles
Elisa Devienne
Oxford University Press
328 Pages
Inventing Paradise: The Power Brokers Who Created the Dream of Los Angeles
Paul Haddad
May 2024
408 Pages
An Urban Odyssey: A Critic’s Search for the Soul of Cities and Self
Sam Hall Kaplan
Cherry Orchard Books
332 Pages
Santa Monica Pier: America's Last Great Pleasure Pier
James Harris
Angel City Press
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World
Malcolm Harris
Little, Brown and Company
720 Pages
The Ghost Forest: Racists, Radicals, and Real Estate in the California Redwoods
Greg King
PublicAffairs
480 Pages
Portal: San Francisco's Ferry Building and the Reinvention of American Cities
John King
320 pages
$19.99
A People's History of SFO: The Making of the Bay Area and an Airport
Eric Porter
University of California Press
304 Pages
Abolish Rent: How Tenants Can End the Housing Crisis
by Tracy Rosenthal and Leonardo Vilchis
Haymarket Books
224 Pages
Renewing the Dream
Edited by James Sanders, Preface by Nik Karalis, Contributions by Frances Anderton and Donald Shoup and Mark Valliantos
September 12, 2023
Rizzoli Electa
260 Pages
California Against the Sea: Visions for Our Vanishing Coastline
Rosanna Xia
Heyday Books
336 Pages
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