San Francisco Bay Shoreline Adaptation Atlas

As the climate continues to change, San Francisco Bay shoreline communities will need to adapt in order to build social and ecological resilience to rising sea levels. Given the complex and varied nature of the Bay shore, a science-based framework is essential to identify effective adaptation strategies that are appropriate for their particular settings and that take advantage of natural processes. This report proposes such a framework--Operational Landscape Units for San Francisco Bay.

For decades, American cities have experimented with ways to remake themselves in response to climate change. These efforts, often driven by grassroots activism, offer valuable lessons for transforming the places we live. In From the Ground Up: Local Efforts to Create Resilient Cities, design expert Alison Sant focuses on the unique ways in which US cities are working to mitigate and adapt to climate change while creating equitable and livable communities. She shows how, from the ground up, we are raising the bar to make cities places in which we don’t just survive, but where all people have the opportunity to thrive. The efforts discussed in the book demonstrate how urban experimentation and community-based development are informing long-term solutions. Sant shows how US cities are reclaiming their streets from cars, restoring watersheds, growing forests, and adapting shorelines to improve people’s lives while addressing our changing climate. The best examples of this work bring together the energy of community activists, the organization of advocacy groups, the power of city government, and the reach of federal environmental policy. Sant presents 12 case studies, drawn from research and over 90 interviews with people who are working in these communities to make a difference. For example, advocacy groups in Washington, DC are expanding the urban tree canopy and offering job training in the growing sector of urban forestry. In New York, transit agencies are working to make streets safer for cyclists and pedestrians while shortening commutes. In San Francisco, community activists are creating shoreline parks while addressing historic environmental injustice. From the Ground Up is a call to action. When we make the places we live more climate resilient, we need to acknowledge and address the history of social and racial injustice. Advocates, non-profit organizations, community-based groups, and government officials will find examples of how to build alliances to support and embolden this vision together. Together we can build cities that will be resilient to the challenges ahead.

“The San Francisco Bay Shoreline Guide takes us on a walking and cycling journey around San Francisco Bay, unfolding the wonder, drama and beauty of one of the great estuaries of the world.”--Robert Redford "From the bustling waterfronts of our cities and towns, to our wild, windswept, and thankfully, protected natural wetlands, this is our fantastic guide to all of the magnificence of the San Francisco Bay Shoreline. Grab it and go on world-class journeys in our own backyard. I'll see you along the trail!"--Doug McConnell, Television Producer and Reporter “This guide helps to create an awareness and appreciation of San Francisco Bay.”--Sylvia McLaughlin, co-founder of Save the Bay Praise from the previous edition "There are absorbing stories here for the armchair reader and detailed guides for the active explorer. Read, enjoy, and cultivate your roots in the region."—Harold Gilliam "Comprehensive and copiously illustrated, this Guide is a treasure-house of user-friendly information. It reveals the equivalent of a national park hitherto unknown in our midst."—Margot Patterson Doss "This book is a complete guide to the Bay Area. All that's missing are the smells, so perhaps the next edition should be scratch and sniff."—Robin Williams

An illuminating profile of the San Francisco Bay Area, and its regional and global influence, as seen from the focal point of San Francisco International Airport (SFO). A People's History of SFO uses the history of San Francisco International Airport (SFO) to tell a multifaceted story of development, encounter, and power in the surrounding region from the eighteenth century to the present. In lively, engaging stories, Eric Porter reveals SFO's unique role in the San Francisco Bay Area's growth as a globally connected hub of commerce, technology innovation, and political, economic, and social influence. Starting with the very land SFO was built on, A People's History of SFO sees the airport as a microcosm of the forces at work in the Bay Area—from its colonial history and early role in trade, mining, and agriculture to the economic growth, social sanctuary, and environmental transformations of the twentieth century. In ways both material and symbolic, small human acts have overlapped with evolving systems of power to create this bustling metropolis. A People's History of SFO ends by addressing the climate crisis, as sea levels rise and threaten SFO itself on the edge of San Francisco Bay.

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.