San Francisco

San Francisco holds a special place in the pantheon of American towns and cities. Its pastel hilltops, Victorian facades, seedy alleyways, and cosmopolitan reputation have long drawn adventure seekers, speculators, migrant laborers, poets, radicals, and immigrants from around the world to the edge of the Golden Gate. “The City,” as it is sometimes referred to by Bay Area locals, is a hearth of tantalizing promise and potential peril, capital-fueled innovation and desperate poverty, and romantic hopes and broken dreams. Perhaps above all else, the City by the Bay is a city of contradictions. San Francisco is one of the richest and most vibrant cities in the United States, home to some of the most powerful information technology companies and venture capital firms in the world. Yet it is also the site of burgeoning socioeconomic inequality, precarious living conditions, and rampant homelessness. The public support for diversity, tolerance, and inclusion so often voiced by city boosters and residents is perpetually belied by ongoing processes of residential displacement and hardening patterns of racial and class stratification. The magnificence of San Francisco’s views and the splendor of its physical setting are matched only by the city’s function as a planning boardroom for the regional extraction of resources and environmental degradation across the globe. And the city’s rich cultural and political history encompasses both the formation of radical movements for racial, class, gender, and sexual liberation as well as instances of racialized colonial violence, anti-immigrant organizing, crass xenophobia, and vigilantism. Indeed, San Francisco presents a kaleidoscopic portrait of urban life in California. The bibliographic essay that follows attempts to offer an initial lens through which to explore the conundrum that is San Francisco. Cited works include historical and geographic studies, period pieces, sweeping overviews of the city and the Bay Area metropolitan region, and ethnographic manuscripts that tackle everyday individual and collective experiences in the landscape. Taking a broadly thematic approach to the literature on the city, the essay tackles key topics such as planning and urban development, politics and the economy, society and sexuality, community formation, environment and nature, architecture and design, music and cultural production, and technology and innovation. Collectively, the titles offered below provide a platform from which to dive into the study of San Francisco in all its complexity.