The Natures of San Francisco

The  similarly fluid but far less anthropocentric image of urban space of San Francisco in the Nature in the City map suggest a basis to explore space as a butterfly, coyote, or cormorant.  If the pulsating GIF of New York’s commuters is appealing because of its striking similarity to a systolic ventricular contraction and diastolic expansion, the map ties vitality of urban space to the intensity of its commerce during the working week–here quantified and measured for map-readers in the commuters coursing in the city underground–in the Manhattan Population Explorer.  In contrast, the vitality surrounding the built city is tracked less in work-weeks than the long term in the two recent maps of San Francisco–both of which expand the focus of a static map by showing activities around built space.

13. The fluidity of space is shown in the vitality and seismic safety in the subject of two maps I want to comparing for how they suggest attempts to map urban vitality and change less aligned with its human inhabitants.  But it also reveals the intensity of efforts of natural restoration that have expanded the areas of habitat in a city as unique as San Francisco , where limited urban growth and expansion have transformed most of the outlying regions of the Bay Area, while leaving many of the parks, urban forests, and open spaces and neighborhood parks preserved, and rooftop gardens have encouraged the maintenance of urban greenspace, and allowed for the growth of managed areas for biodiversity, unlike many cities.

The broader purview of the maps of San Francisco–a city far more tied to nature and to the fluidity of natural forms–gesture to geological time and the migration of species across seasons, to suggest the different experience of western coastalism, or coastal environments.  Rather than focus on the terrors of projected sea-level change, the threat of fires along wildland-urban interfaces, or the consequences of drought, both suggest the need to integrate sensitivity to natural change in maps, in ways map of most other cities may not capture so fully.  The alternate images of a city defined by its ecoystems or by deep-lying shifts of tectonic plates and underground low-lying fault lines, often forgotten by planners who redefined their relation to building codes, or the rich ecosystems around which commuters move, present an enriched concept of space and place, less tied to building patterns and urban development, in ways that seem more ethical in their purchase on an inter-connected space.

The result is to extend the pedagogical function of the map as a project of public education, and learning, by shifting the relation at which data lies in the map in relation to the viewer, as much as to place a premium on its legibility:  we are invited to engage the data in a delightfully embodied way, resisting the disembodied data deposited in the overlays of most web-based maps.  The exultant result is quite data-rich, but not at all data-centric:  untethered from the constraints of data, and the pointillist authority of the pixel, we appreciate the detail of the pictorial map evoked in its surface, over which we are invited to pour with keen attention and attentiveness, as much as shocked as we imagine the collapse of the tall buildings–from the Salesforce Tower tot he Transamerica  building–whose electricity would potentially suddenly be disrupted by a quake.

And although when the New York Times adopted the new set of USGS data on liquefaction zones that stretch across most of downtown San Francisco to map recent ambitions of building in an area of severe and historical seismic risk, the striking end-product that projected three-dimensional extrusions of each buildings, situating them as lone witnesses standing like holographic sentinels over an aerial photograph of the ruins of the 1906 earthquake, similarly suggests a temporally deep space,  if one focussed on one single incident in somewhat glibly simplified terms, to ask bluntly if the site of the earthquake has somehow forgotten the event that shaped the evolution of its urban space in permitting the violation of local building codes.

There may be a need to excavate this sense of deep space, given the limits of memory in most data-centric maps.  The richness of “deep space” in the “nature” map captures enriched perspective on place it offers viewers–orienting them to the space of its waterways, springs, watersheds, and shoreline, with an eye to how each layer of geomorphology redefined and will continued to redefine its habitats in ways that open some deep continuities over time.  The density of detail that suggests an appreciation of place as an ecosystem, rather than a point, recalls the relation to place cultivated in Rebeca Solnit’s marvelous atlases of urban sites, which as much as presenting way finding guides compile the layered human habitation of place that treat the map as a form of exploration.  As Solnit’s maps exult in the possibilities of cartographical legibility which are increasingly limited in the standardized and somewhat sanitized formats of our own servers and data maps, uniting and adapting maps, overlays, illustration and ortho-imagery of aerial photography in a particularly sensitive synthetic register of place from several perspectives, uniting terrain, watersheds, and bathymetric readings in a broad and deeply textured record of habitats.