Additional information
by Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (Author), Ananya Roy (Foreword by), Chris Carlsson (Foreword by)
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. By weaving these themes together, Counterpoints expands normative urban-studies framings of gentrification to consider more complex, regional, historically grounded, and entangled horizons for understanding the present. Understanding the tech boom and its effects means looking beyond San Francisco's borders to consider the region as a socially, economically, and politically interconnected whole and reckoning with the area's deep history of displacement, going back to its first moments of settler colonialism. Counterpoints combines work from within the project with contributions from community partners, from longtime community members who have been fighting multiple waves of racial dispossession to elementary school youth envisioning decolonial futures. In this way, Counterpoints is a collaborative, co-created atlas aimed at expanding knowledge on displacement and resistance in the Bay Area with, rather than for or about, those most impacted.
Author Biography
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.
