Acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg survey San Francisco's transformation through gentrification in the early millenium

Surveying the transformation of San Francisco in the early millenium by Silicon Valley, critically acclaimed writer Rebecca Solnit and photographer Susan Schwartzenberg describe the complex interactions that make up a living, creative, diverse city.

One of our most impassioned and acclaimed chroniclers of American urbanism, Rebecca Solnit explores the impact of skyrocketing rents, architectural homogenization, and the links between artists and gentrification. Wealth, she argues, is just as capable of ravaging cities as poverty. Schwartzenberg's social documentary photographs work with Solnit's interlinked essays to memorialize San Francisco's vanishing spaces of civic memory and public life.

Both a portrait of an acute crisis and a call to defend collective public life, Hollow City makes a fervent case for the imaginative potential of cities.

"Schwartzenberg's images survey more than thirty years of upheaval in the name of 'urban renewal,' and Solnit's text brings urgency to the question of whether a place in which artists, activists, and members of diverse races and classes can no longer afford to live is fated to become 'a city of presentation without creation.'" - New Yorker

"Passionate, potent, and to the point, Solnit's polemic embodies American political and social writing at its best." - Publishers Weekly

"Nearly 20 years ago, long-time San Francisco resident Rebecca Solnit, in her Hollow City: The Siege of San Francisco and the Crisis of American Urbanism, described the coming gentrification, privatization, and homogenization and subsequent hollowing out of a vibrant metropolis. This is a prescient book of linked essays, illustrated with photographs by Susan Schwartzenberg." - Public Books