Eichler Homes's Plan for Golden Gateway, composite photograph (Raster Image)

Author(s)

Eichler Homes, Inc

Description

The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency held a design competition for the Golden Gateway Redevelopment site. This 51-acre area had been home to a large produce market, which was run by many Italian Americans who lived in the North Beach neighborhood. This plan is part of the Leiken Enterprises's entry into the competition. This project traces the history of urban planning in San Francisco, placing special emphasis on unrealized schemes. Rather than using visual material simply to illustrate outcomes, Imagined San Francisco uses historical plans, maps, architectural renderings, and photographs to show what might have been. By enabling users to layer a series of urban plans, the project presents the city not only as a sequence of material changes, but also as a contingent process and a battleground for political power. Savvy institutional actors--like banks, developers, and many public officials--understood that in some cases to clearly articulate their interests would be to invite challenges. That means that textual sources like newspapers and municipal reports are limited in what they can tell researchers about the shape of political power. Urban plans, however, often speak volumes about interests and dynamics upon which textual sources remain silent. Mortgage lenders, for example, apparently thought it unwise to state that they wished to see a poor neighborhood cleared, to be replaced with a freeway onramp. Yet visual analysis of planning proposals makes that interest plain. So in the process of showing how the city might have looked, Imagined San Francisco also shows how political power actually was negotiated and exercised. Eichler Homes, Inc (2019). Eichler Homes's Plan for Golden Gateway, composite photograph (Raster Image). Stanford University. Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/rn433cp3449 This layer is presented in the WGS84 coordinate system for web display purposes. Downloadable data are provided in native coordinate system or projection.

Publisher

Stanford University. Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis

Collection

Imagined San Francisco

Place(s)

San Francisco (Calif.)

Subject(s)

City planning, Imagery and Base Maps, and Planning and Cadastral

Year

1960

Held by

Stanford

More details at

https://purl.stanford.edu/rn433cp3449

Use and reproduction

You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use.

License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (CC BY).