Introducing the Audio Book

When I asked in the first edition of Imperial San Francisco if cities are worth it, I’m afraid now that I erred. After all, I enjoy what cities have to offer and I often spend my vacations in them. Those who can’t afford to do so — and the animals and plants pushed aside and exterminated by their incessant growth — might beg to differ if they had voice to do so.

Many who read Imperial San Francisco think that it’s about the pretty city of its title, but like John Ruskin’s Stones of Venice which partly inspired it, it’s about all cities …. what they are doing to our planet and to us …. for whom they are doing it …  and how. I am recording it in Los Angeles, a seemingly infinite city like so many others today, a city whose growth is stopped only by the Pacific Ocean and the abrupt escarpment of the San Gabriel Mountains behind it. That growth will inevitably be curtailed not only when the ocean rises and the mountains lurch,   but when the resources that it needs to function are stanched by what heedless urban growth has set in motion here and everywhere else. 

That is only truer today in 2023 than when I wrote a new preface for the second edition sixteen years ago in 2007. The core three chapters of the book, after all, are called The Thought-Shapers, and those who shape our thoughts today through their ownership of mass media and social media such as Rupert Murdoch, and others less known, are far more powerful today than was William Randolph Hearst who figures large in the book. Yet they are at the same time far less visible than that flamboyant media baron of the last century. That is the way they like it since —  as I say at the end of the Hearst chapter — omission is a far more effective means of thought-control than commission. It is hardly accidental that we do not know what and whom today’s media barons own, while their lucrative replacement of education with spectacular entertainment and addictive distraction prevents us from knowing how they operate like the drug pushers they are. As the title of Neal Postman’s 1985 book has it, we are amusing ourselves to death — or rather, they are doing it for us to their own enrichment — at least until they can’t. Too often cocooned by their immense wealth, they are often the last to know what is going on in the reality that we all actually share.

I should have asked instead, how large should cities be given their parasitic nature. Imperial San Francisco seeks to use one city to explain how urban metastasis works — and for whom. It’s a diagnosis that should be discussed even as climate chaos becomes insistently undeniable, yet it is not. Cities such as Jakarta and Miami continue to grow both vertically and horizontally even as water rises against and under them, or like Phoenix, and Shanghai as the reservoirs they rely on to generate power for air conditioning drop at the same time that heat rises to lethal levels. Everywhere, growing cities’ demands and waste are shredding the intricate biotic web which supports us all.

I cannot say that I welcomed the book’s conclusion, so I sought out an alternative reality where wisdom might have prevailed. I found it in a vast matrix of artifacts that are all about us but as unseen as they are indispensable. They are the remains of a lost civilization once built by President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal to extricate the country from the crisis of the Great Depression, a civilization which the Living New Deal project is currently excavating. Those artifacts speak to me of an optimism almost entirely absent today. As I wrote in the new preface to the book, they represent a purposeful movement away from the ethos of mining that has brought us to this place and towards the elimination of poverty that, as Roosevelt said, is the root of so many other problems. I concluded then that when all else has failed, that route remains to be tried again. Sixteen years on, that remains far truer than when I wrote it in 2007.

Content warning

This audio edition of Imperial San Francisco includes numerous direct quotes from historical publications and individuals that use language and terminology common to their time. We've chosen to keep quotes with words or phrases which, in today's context, would be regarded as offensive uncensored not because we don't understand their power to harm, but to bear witness to the casual use of such language at the time, and to its potency to shape mass thought.   

San Francisco as a Roman centurion straddles the Golden Gate and points his sword  west to the Pacific in anticipation of the city's 1915 world’s fair. Sunset, December, 1910.