The New Economy and its dislocations in San Francisco’s South of Market Area

The twenty-five-minute taxi or shuttle ride north from San Francisco Airport (SFO) to the City of San Francisco reveals a sequence of illustrative landscapes and landmarks. The excursion from SFO to the City enables views of the Fordist hillside housing landscapes of Daly City, which achieved a sort of pejorative fame in Pete Seeger’s ironic homage to the ‘ticky-tacky’ houses and lifestyles of postwar suburban America. A roadside archipelago of stand-alone office buildings and acres of surface parking scattered along the highway exemplify the ‘edgeless city’ phenomenon of ex-urban North America. The journey northward on Route 101 also offers panoramic views of San Francisco Bay, including anchored naval ships which remind us of the more martial identity of the paradigmatic 1960s city of harmonic peace. The East Bay (part of Alameda County) encompasses the persistently industrial Oakland and the University of California at Berkeley, a bastion of intellectual liberalism and radicalism, with the cerulean skies of northern California as backdrop to one of the world’s most favoured regions.