With dazzling omniscience, Cary McClelland’s Silicon City: San Francisco in the Long Shadow of the Valley, delivers the voices of the people, each one sharing their own understanding of the city, like an oral history of the present. It’s complex, compelling, and its upcoming publication on Oct. 9 feels like a cultural event ... panoramic, complex — and surprisingly well-balanced.
Not so much a direct indictment of the tech industry or other forces that have reshaped San Francisco as a conflicted and complex portrait of a city starving for solutions ... essential.
McClelland’s interviewees share many thought-provoking anecdotes, narratives, and dialogues ... Recommended for readers interested in human interest stories, urban studies, and the socioeconomics of urban America, and lovers of oral history.
Captures the allure of mass Disruption in light of inflexible government locked into four- and eight-year cycles. A panoramic collection of civilian interviews, it's intended to resemble Studs Terkel, but the effect is much closer to Humans of New York ... While the interviews themselves are something of a mixed bag, McClelland’s portrayal of systemic iniquities upon individual lives makes for an affecting read ... McClelland’s passages are softly prescriptive ... McClelland’s subjects characterize Bay Area gentrification as a malicious attack, as if every twenty- and thirty-something in San Francisco is a billionaire Harvard grad who’s personally decided to displace native residents — rather than cash-poor arrivistes adapting to an American economy in which approximately three-and-a-half cities have any industry to speak of at all.
The downside to this vignette-like documentary approach is that all voices are considered equal ... But do we really need to hear another techie go on about the importance of 'disruption' and self-driving cars? ... McClelland lets the tech world’s utopian rhetoric speak for itself ... McClelland has undertaken a herculean feat of sociological cataloguing, and offers an ambitious, thorough look at a city that seems to be ripping at the seams.
The descriptions are long and the prescriptions few, but it’s striking how many of McClelland’s respondents, no matter what their work or background, are concerned with building a better, more equitable city. The book is firmly in the Studs Terkel tradition of first-person–based explorations of working-class life; if it lacks some of Terkel’s literary and sociological power, it’s still a solid contribution to popular urban studies ... Students of inequality and demographics will find powerful anecdotal evidence for how the changing cityscape brings both harm and good.
The interview subjects, who include a newly arrived software engineer, a longtime cab driver, and a union organizer, tell fascinating stories, but the book’s apparently random choice of subjects and lack of authorial interpretation can leave the reader adrift. The brief expository pieces that introduce each section give only limited direction. McClelland provides an open-ended, glimpse into the lives of several San Francisco residents, but readers looking for a comprehensive take on the city’s vast transformation will be disappointed.
