Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement & Resistance

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.

The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project (AEMP) is a data visualization, critical cartography, and multimedia storytelling collective that documents displacement and resistance struggles on gentrifying landscapes. With chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, and Los Angeles, the collective works with numerous community partners and housing justice networks in order to provide data, maps, stories, and tools for resisting displacement. AEMP has produced hundreds of maps, oral histories, and multimedia pieces, as well as dozens of community events and reports, and numerous academic and public facing articles, book chapters, and murals. AEMP’s work has been presented in a variety of venues, from art galleries and collectives to neighborhood block parties, from academic colloquia and conferences to community workshops and book fairs.

Ananya Roy is a professor of urban planning, social welfare, and geography and the Meyer and Renee Luskin Chair in Inequality and Democracy at UCLA, where she is the inaugural director of the Institute on Inequality and Democracy. Her most recent book is Encountering Poverty: Thinking and Acting in an Unequal World. Ananya leads the National Science Foundation supported global research network, Housing Justice in Unequal Cities, as well as the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar, Sanctuary Spaces: Reworlding Humanism.

Chris Carlsson is a writer, San Francisco historian, “professor,” bicyclist, tour guide, blogger, photographer, and book and magazine designer. He’s lived in San Francisco since 1978, cofounded Critical Mass in September 1992, has directed Shaping San Francisco since its inception in the mid-1990s, and continues to be codirector of the archive of San Francisco history at FoundSF.org. His books and edited volumes include Nowtopia; Critical Mass; Ten Years That Shook the City: San Francisco, 1968–78; Reclaiming San Francisco; and, most recently, Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories.