urban guerillas sociopolitical architecture of the public realm
street codes | san francisco by christopher roach
gentrification protest counter-culture POPOS guerilla urbanism
I [one] On the east end of 24th Street in San Francisco, stretching from Va- lencia Street to Potrero Avenue, is a world that is neither exclusively Latin American, nor definitively North American, but is particular to San Francisco and, more specifically, the Mission District. I can get fresh masa to make tortillas at La Palma Mexicatessen, sip the best cappuccinos at Café Venice, buy fresh produce from several sidewalk groceries, feast on tacos al pastor for a few bucks at Taqueria Vallarta or have a malted milkshake at the St. Francis Soda Fountain. Tree-lined, two-way, crowded with slow-moving traffic on a busy Saturday afternoon, I can still call out to a friend across the street and jaywalk safely to shake his hand. Both sides of the street are lined with small storefronts, catering largely, though not exclusively, to the resident Latino community. There are relics of a more distant past, such as the St. Francis, when Mission was a working-class neighbourhood of Irish, Italian and Scandinavian immigrants. There is also a creeping, eminent gentrification: sev- eral stylish cafés and boutique stores have cropped up to serve the growing white professional class that is moving into the affordable Mission neighbourhoods. At the other end of 24th Street, heading over the hill at Dolores Street and down into Noe Valley, is a different though not altogether alien world, where French bistros replace taquerias, and tandem strollers almost outnumber cars. At this end of the street I’m more likely to find artisan cheese and an expensive bottle of wine, or per- haps a nice pair of shoes, but I can still grab a greasy slice of pizza and watch a soccer game at the local pub. Punctuating the continu- ous row of small three and four-storey buildings is a small parking lot that becomes an upscale farmer’s market on Saturdays; further down, the local CalaFoods supermarket is set back behind its park- ing lot. Nonetheless, this end of 24th continues familiar, small- scale retail with a few storeys of housing above. The sidewalks are clean and most buildings have a fresh coat of paint, but there’s a noticeably more homogeneous and sanitised feeling on this end of the street. There are no murals, less graffiti, fewer street vendors, and I rarely hear a foreign language spoken here. These two ends of 24th street represent a kind of urban dialec- tic of use and culture representative of larger forces at work in the evolution of a city such as San Francisco. There are certainly streets that are more grand, and others more important in the city’s history and culture – Market Street, Mission Street or Columbus Avenue – but in these 24 city blocks one can still read an entire disserta- tion on the particularity of a place and time in the life of the city. A hermeneutical reading of streets reveals a fragment of the underly- ing code of our entire society. By parsing the language of the social, political, and economic structures embodied in our streets, they can tell us volumes about ourselves and the world we have made; both the delights and the dangers that we face. For if we turn the page to read another street, we may find that the tale it tells is not one of urbane diversity and harmonious civility, but one of dislocation, disenfranchisement and decay.
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street, street smarts, street life: onsite 19
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