ABSTRACT
Geoffrey West stood in front of a crowded auditorium at the Long Now Foundation in Fort Mason on a pier jutting out into the San Francisco Bay and told the story he had found the secret key to the city. A human being is blown-up version of the mouse, says West, and blue whale is just blown-up version of a human being. A physicist at the Santa Fe Institute, West are famous for having discovered with biologist James Brown, fundamental laws about the scale of organisms, from tiny mice to giant blue whales. Saltworks is a starting point for exploring the contingent emergence of historical strands of environmental urbanism that have shaped and been shaped by the San Francisco Bay Area, up to and including the latest arguments over ecological urbanism and new urbanism embodied in the controversy. In the third act, as a new millennium approached, the reach of a new generation of ambitious 'metrotopians' had exceeded its hold.
