San Francisco is increasingly at the center of the technological revolution that began in Silicon Valley. In this session, we explore the impact of the riches brought in by that sector on the people and landscapes of the city. What groups, skills, and lifestyles are now missing from the urban environment? What has emerged instead? How has this reshaped the area? What are the consequences for the city as a whole?
Speakers
Gary Kamiya is the author of the bestselling book Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco and the history column "Portals of the Past" which appears every other Saturday in the San Francisco Chronicle. He was a co-founder and longtime executive editor of the groundbreaking web site Salon.com, and the former executive editor of San Francisco Magazine.
Wendy Liu is a tech writer based in San Francisco who writes about technology & labor from a socialist perspective. Before discovering the "left", she was a software engineer and startup founder.
Stephanie Pau is a content strategist, producer, and storyteller who has created award-winning audiovisual stories and digital projects at places like MoMA New York, SFMOMA, and the California Academy of Sciences. After nearly twenty years in arts education and museum interpretation, she recently joined the Content Strategy team at Airbnb.
Richard Walker is Professor Emeritus of Geography at UC Berkeley, where he taught 1975- 2012. He has written on a diverse range of topics, including co-authoring two classics in economic geography, The Capitalist Imperative (1989) and The New Social Economy (1992). He has written extensively on California, including The Conquest of Bread (2004) and The Atlas of California (2013)(co-authored), and on the San Francisco Bay Area, in The Country in the City (2007) and Pictures of a Gone City (2018). Walker has received awards for his work from the Fulbright program, Guggenheim Foundation, Association of American Geographers, California Studies Association, and Western History Association. Prof. Walker is currently the Director of the Living New Deal, a public service project to educate Americans about the achievements of the federal programs under President Franklin D. Roosevelt.