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

Description

Counterpoints: 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, including: evictions and root shock, indigenous geographies, health and environmental racism, state violence, transportation and infrastructure, migration and relocation, and speculative futures.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project is a data visualization, critical cartography, and multimedia storytelling collective that documents displacement and resistance struggles on gentrifying terrains. Chris Carlsson is a writer, San Francisco historian, "professor," bicyclist, tour guide, blogger, photographer, and book and magazine designer. Ananya Roy is a professor of urban planning, social welfare, and geography and the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, where she is the inaugural director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy.

"This collection literally makes visible intersecting lines of structural violence that produce displacement and dispossession, while also tracing creative resistances that are always challenging these processes and building more just futures. As an atlas, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance is transformative and inspiring--it refuses the knowledge making and representational practices that bind cartography to settler colonialism and racial capitalism, instead developing ethical cartographies and collective praxes for mapping otherwise." --Sarah Elwood, professor of geography, University of Washington, author of Relational Poverty Politics: Forms, Struggles, Possibilities "Since the colonization of this land, capitalist, racist, and patriarchal structures have violently silenced and stolen from our communities the ability to map and tell our stories. Even as recently as ten years ago, as organizers in the Bay Area, we spent endless nights debating if we could even use the word "gentrification" as a mobilizing counterforce in our communities. But the landscape is vastly different today. There is no more doubt that we are in the midst of a deep housing and affordability crisis. To transform the current system requires us to build a movement led by the communities that are most impacted. And this movement cannot be limited to housing; it must be anti-racist and anti-capitalist, it must be queer, it must be feminist, it must be Black and Latino and Indigenous, and it must be intersectional. Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance is a book courageously and defiantly marking this transformation. It is a truth-seeking decolonial resistance to historical traditions and injustices of cartography and power. It is place-making and space-making for all those who have never located themselves in conversations of gentrification, displacement, and neoliberal development." --Dawn Phillips, Executive Director, Right to the City Alliance "Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance is a necessary counterpoint to the cheerleaders for the Age of Tech in the San Francisco Bay Area. The people have suffered mightily as their city has been turned upside down by boomtown madness, bloated by unconscionable wealth, invaded by global capital, and strangled by real estate speculation. The admirable activists at the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project have used their collective geographical imaginations to lay bare the facts of displacement, the resulting social upheavals and the people's struggles to reclaim their right to the city." --Richard Walker, professor emeritus of geography, University of California, Berkeley; author of The Conquest of Bread: 150 Years of Agribusiness in California and Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area "The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project's work is inspiring for activist cartographers and mapping activists in a number of ways: its strategic use of maps to accuse the manifold forms of oppression in neoliberal urbanization; its commitment to local communities and underrepresented spatial subjectivities; and its involvement with multiple (artistic) measures of activist action. This atlas, we believe, has the potential to instigate social justice struggles in cities worldwide." --kollektiv orangotango, author of This is Not an Atlas "Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance is a politically urgent and timely account of the historical and present-day forces of dispossession and resistance in the Bay Area. The atlas contains a wide-ranging archive that assembles the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project's maps and oral histories, accounts of struggles around eviction, movements for environmental justice, histories of migration, and indigenous geographies produced by scholars, activists, journalists, and residents of the Bay Area. As a counter-cartography that is deeply rooted in community knowledge and struggle, this groundbreaking text makes visible the places and people that Google maps and real estate speculators erase. This book is a must read not just for those living in the Bay Area but for anyone interested in countering the spatial violence induced by racial capitalism." --Neda Atanasoski, professor of feminist studies, University of California, Santa Cruz; author of Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures