Richard A. Walker is professor emeritus of geography at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1975 to 2012. Walker has written on a diverse range of topics in economic, urban, and environmental geography, with scores of published articles to his credit. He is coauthor of The Capitalist Imperative (1989) and The New Social Economy (1992) and has written extensively on California, including The Conquest of Bread (2004), The Country in the City (2007) and The Atlas of California (2013).
Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area
SKU: 9781629635101
Author: Richard A. Walker
Publisher: PM Press/ Spectre
ISBN: 9781629635101
Published: 5/2018
Format: Paperback
Page count: 480
Subjects: Economics/Technology
Praise
“San Francisco has battened from its birth on instant wealth, high
tech weaponry, and global commerce, and the present age is little
different. Gold, silver, and sleek iPhones—they all glitter in the
California sun and are at least as magnetic as the city’s spectacular
setting, benign climate, and laissez-faire lifestyles. The cast of
characters changes, but the hustlers and thought-shapers eternally reign
over the city and its hinterland, while in their wake they leave a
ruined landscape of exorbitant housing, suburban sprawl, traffic
paralysis, and delusional ideas about a market free enough to rob the
majority of their freedom. Read all about it here, and weep.”
—Gray Brechin, author of Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin
“Too many studies of cities dwell on their peculiarities; this
fascinating book balances the dramatic story of the Bay Area against a
profound understanding of urbanization. It eschews a descriptive
narrative in favor of hard-hitting critical analysis. The book is not
only about the inherently contradictory development of the San Francisco
region, but also about where it stands in relation to the rest of the
United States, even the world and why it matters so much. No one but
Richard Walker combines such an intimate knowledge of one city with the
theoretical insights necessary to make sense of it.”
—Kevin Cox, author of The Politics of Urban and Regional Development and the American Exception
“Debunking the Horatio Alger promotional blather of self-flattering
tech moguls, the real Bay Area comes into view, based on nurses and
teachers, drivers and clerks, homeless and the desperate. Real estate
bubbles have given way to tech bubbles which have given way to housing
bubbles, and now have given way to a chimerical prosperity that is as
fragile as any of the prior ones.”
—Chris Carlsson, San Francisco historian and cofounder of Critical Mass
“Walker has given us a brilliantly accessible and fact-laden
political economy of the San Francisco Bay Area—America’s richest and
fastest changing metropolis. Pictures of a Gone City explains
both the miracle of Silicon Valley and the heavy price, in growing
inequality, unaffordability, and environmental impact, that the Bay Area
is paying for it.”
—Wendy Brown, author of Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution
“With Pictures of a Gone City, California’s greatest
geographer tells us how the Bay Area has become the global center of
hi-tech capitalism. Drawing on a lifetime of research, Richard Walker
dismantles the mythology of the New Economy, placing its creativity in a
long history of power, work, and struggles for justice.”
—Jason W. Moore, author of Capitalism in the Web of Life
Book Events
january, 2025
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Reviews
- Pictures of a Gone City in AAG Review of Books
- Tech, Class, Resistance: A Geography of Struggle
- Pictures of a Gone City Reviewed in Insurgent Notes
- Only Connect: A Review of Richard Walker’s Pictures of a Gone City
- Pictures of a Gone City Paints a Vivid, Learned Portrait of the Bay Area
- Pictures of a Gone City in The New York Journal of Books
- Pictures of a Gone City Reivewed in Antipode Journal
- San Francisco; or, How to Destroy a City
Interviews
- Richard Walker on Making the Left Coast Podcast
- Richard Walker at UC Berkeley, Department of Geography Department Weekly Colloquium
- Richard Walker at The Mechanics’ Institute Library (6/7/2018)
- Q&A with Richard Walker, Author of Pictures of a Gone City, in the San Jose Mercury News
- The Dark Side of the Silicon Gold Rush: Q&A with Richard Walker, Author of Pictures of a Gone City
- Richard Walker Interviewed on The Commonwealth Club
- Richard Walker Interviewed on Recode
- San Francisco; or, How to Destroy a City
- Richard Walker at the California Historical Society, January 9, 2019
- How Should the Bay Area Tackle Inequality and Poverty?
Mentions
- The American Sea of Deception
- San Francisco Is So Expensive, You Can Make Six Figures and Still Be ‘Low Income’