Designing San Francisco is the untold story of the formative postwar decades when U.S. cities took their modern shape amid clashing visions of the future. An evocative portrait of San Francisco between the 1940s and 1970s, the book focuses on the artists, activists, and others who played pivotal roles in rebuilding the city as it underwent large-scale redevelopment. Join us as Alison Isenberg discusses a new paradigm for understanding past and present struggles to define an urban future, and compares and contrasts the well-known example of midcentury Manhattan (think Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs) with equally contentious San Francisco.
Alison Isenberg
Alison Isenberg is Professor of History at Princeton University, where she co-directs the Princeton-Mellon Initiative in Architecture, Urbanism, and the Humanities. She is the author of Downtown America: A History of the Place and the People Who Made It.