The City and its Periphery

If you're in the Bay Area at the end of month, consider attending an event called Macro City, organized and hosted by the Infrastructure Observatory. Its purpose is "to explore the vast, often overlooked networks of infrastructure that surround us," and, in the process, "to celebrate the numerous people whose countless efforts shape the built landscape every day."

Probably the most interesting part of the whole event is the ambitious program of local field trips, all of which take place on May 30th. They include guided tours of everything from the Zanker landfill & recovery facility down in San Jose to one of San Francisco's wastewater treatment plants, and from a construction aggregate terminal and a kayak trip to an activist walking tour of the city's many surveillance cameras.

[Image: The Dutra Group's extraordinary San Rafael rock quarry, a Macro City field trip site and striking reversal of the figure-ground relationship; photo courtesy of baycrossings/Macro City].

Tickets are available at various levels of price and access—and I should point out that I am also speaking at the event, alongside Nicola Twilley, so my opinion betrays some bias—but the conference has a great and important interpretive mission, and seems well worth attending: "We rarely see in full the cities that we live in," the organizers write. "Focused on our daily lives, urban dwellers are often only dimly aware of the numerous, enmeshed layers of critical infrastructure that quietly hum in the background to make modern life possible."

Come tour and talk about those hidden systems—especially in this time of drought, causing infrastructure to run back to front—on May 30 and 31, at SPUR and the Brava Theater in San Francisco. See the Macro City site for more details.