Natures of San Francisco

By better orienting us to the lived reality on the ground, shores, and waters around San Francisco, the recent remapping of open spaces in San Francisco by which local environmental non-profit Nature in the City has taken the time and effort to refocus attention from its buildings or paved environment, inviting us to appreciate the work of the non-profit in planning active green spaces in the urban space that San Francisco contains by representing the city’s urban space in a distinct cartographic idiom:  Nobel Laureate Thomas Tranströmer wrote of how the disbelief of Henry David Thoreau “disappear[ed] deep in his inner greenness artful and hopeful,” cartographers worked to allow readers to detecting habitat within the urban environment in a distinctly Thoreau-like marveling of how natural habitat exist within a city that goes often undetected and–as only a map can remind us–isn’t hidden but overlooked.

Nature in the City 2018/draft

Nature in the City paper map helpfully addressed a general reader in the age of bespoke data-heavy maps, coded for individual  uses, using graphics to hone a rich set of databases to invite all readers of the map to examine the intersection of layers of greenspace, parks, and urban trees provide a surface that any viewer can navigate to reacquaint themselves to urban space that questions its edges, centers, and the frame of a greater ecosystem of which the “city” is the microcosm and condensation:  the countryside that we place outside of the walls of the city–extra muros–is revealed to lie instead at its center, emblematized by the coyote who raises his or her head as if to exult in being present in the remaining green environment–a sort of pictorial designation of the indexical deictic reminder “YOU ARE HERE.”  The observer is decentered, for  a moment, in the map however, as one examines where species are located, as if in the recent Nature in the City challenge.

The claim that is invested in most tourist way-finding maps is repeated by the images of a sand dollar, magnolia, jackrabbit, California Poppy, shorebird, whale and two butterflies–each included in the key of the map on its left margin–to remind map readers that “they” are here, inviting discovery from visitors to the city its real urban spaceMuch as a legend to the left margin invites you to cross-reference them with landcover, the icons of animals suggest something like a hide-and-seek game for visitors to explore the actual urban environment and its riches of habitat–sensitive habitats that Nature in the City has selected to foreground.