Designing San Francisco: Art, Land, and Urban Renewal in the City by the Bay

• Published in: CAA.reviews (New York, N.Y.)
• Main Author: Goldstein, Brian D
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: New York College Art Association, Inc 18-07-2019
• Subjects: African Americans; Architecture; Collaboration; Design; Designers; History; Modernism; Property management; Public lands; Roles; Urban renewal; San Francisco California; United States > US; Virginia
• ISSN: 1543-950X
• DOI: 10.3202/caa.reviews.2019.75

Urban development, she convincingly shows, saw the constant movement of ideas, techniques, and people between the public and private sectors, involved everyone from publicists to artists to graphic designers, drew from and influenced building practices far outside urban and even suburban contexts, and involved competing visions beyond the Robert Moses/Jane Jacobs dichotomy. [...]Isenberg claims that questions of land stewardship provided crucial lenses through which people understood and debated urban development in this era, but subsequent historical accounts have largely overlooked this importance of land. [...]except for a brief discussion of the Sun-Reporter in the book’s introduction, there is no extended consideration of the part its journalists and other African Americans played as allied professionals who shaped an understanding of land’s importance in development. Race is discussed in the conclusion through the question of black land ownership, but the given example is from Washington, DC, which seems to only highlight the absence of fuller consideration of the role African Americans played in this history in the Bay Area.