A New Virtual Issue About San Francisco

Research and writing on the city of San Francisco and the Bay Area have appeared in IJURR for more than four decades. This virtual issue on San Francisco draws together 12 previously published pieces dating back to 1981, telling not a single story of the city, but offering windows into a shifting set of problematics in urban and regional research. From neighborhood politics and regional growth machines to immigrant clustering, foreclosure geographies, tech-led gentrification and dis/possessory data politics, these pieces demonstrate how San Francisco has served as a key site from which to document and reflect on the changing dynamics of North American urbanism. As geographers and urbanists gather for the 2026 AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco (March 17-21), we offer this selection of pieces on San Francisco that engage both longstanding and emerging concerns in critical urban studies.

This is the second virtual issue IJURR has dedicated to San Francisco and Northern California. In IJURR’s first virtual issue on San Francisco, published a decade ago, also inspired by the location of the 2016 AAG, guest editor Alex Schafran foregrounded “politics, intransigence and profiteering” in the Bay Area, highlighting conflicts over redevelopment, persistent challenges of regional coordination, and the speculative transformations of the post-crisis metropolis. That collection introduced San Francisco as a theatre of austerity, protest, and speculative urbanism in the wake of the Great Recession. The present issue extends that view both backwards and forwards. By reaching back to the early 1980s and bringing the story up to the early 2020s, we can see San Francisco’s significance for critical urban studies shifting from a site of growth coalitions and industrial restructuring, to the politics of immigration and regional transformation, to a more recent focus on housing crises, evictions, and data-mediated forms of displacement and anti-eviction activism.

Pieces published from the early 1980s through the mid-1990s situate San Francisco in ongoing debates about growth politics, regional restructuring, and immigrant settlement, foreshadowing the city’s more recent technology-driven transformations and associated distributional conflicts. One of the first pieces IJURR published on the city is John Mollenkopf’s comparative analysis of neighborhood political development and the politics of urban growth in Boston and San Francisco, tracing the emergence of new political coalitions from the late 1950s through the late 1970s that lay the groundwork for later development conflicts. AnnaLee Saxenian’s 1983 essay on the “urban contradictions” of Silicon Valley links regional growth and industrial restructuring to questions of spatial form and class relations, similarly previewing concerns that would become even more central in recent years. Meanwhile Stephanie Pincetl’s history of the “regional management of growth” in California dissects the institutional failures and political struggles that shaped regional growth and coordination challenges. Taken together, these pieces foreground the entanglements of capital, governance, and urban space that would continue to define IJURR’s engagement with the region.

Mid-1990s work on Proposition 187 and immigration politics extends this view by centering race and migration in analyses of California’s urbanization. Ralph Armbruster, Kim Geron and Edna Bonacich’s article on the “assault on California’s Latino immigrants” situates Proposition 187 within a broader racial-nationalist project, a framing that now feels chillingly relevant for contemporary national-level assaults on immigrant communities. Michael Peter Smith and Bernadette Tarallo ask whether the initiative should be understood as a global trend or local narrative, comparing California with Arizona and Texas. These essays ask us to consider how statewide ballot measures and anti-immigrant campaigns reshape the terrain of urban and regional politics, with San Francisco and the Bay Area positioned within a wider geography of racialized governance and political mobilizations.

The early 2000s mark a second phase in the collection, in which questions of immigration and regional restructuring are taken up more explicitly at the metropolitan scale. Ayse Pamuk’s study of the geography of immigrant clusters in San Francisco uses census data to map Chinese, Filipino and Mexican clustering patterns and housing conditions, demonstrating how immigrant suburbanization and distinct clustering logics unsettle older models of spatial assimilation. Alex Schafran’s analysis of the “geography of foreclosure” and the restructuring of the Bay Area traces how demographic shifts, policy changes and capital flows produced an exurban crisis on the metropolitan edge, linking foreclosure hotspots in places like East Contra Costa County to decades of uneven development, exclusionary zoning, and neoliberal reworking of the regional landscape. These pieces reposition San Francisco not only as a central city but as part of a larger, dynamically restructured megaregion.

The most recent phase of IJURR pieces on San Francisco, from the 2010s to the present, positions the city as a key site of housing crisis, gentrification and technology-driven urbanization. Elvin Wyly’s article on “YIMBY: The Latest Frontier of Gentrification” reads pro-building activism and deregulation politics as extensions and reconfigurations of long-standing struggles over growth, displacement and urban citizenship. Erin McElroy’s piece on dis/possessory data politics traces the role of tenant screening, data platforms and digital infrastructures in facilitating eviction and in enabling new forms of anti-eviction organizing. Declan Martin and Carl Grodach’s comparative work on cultural manufacturers in San Francisco and Melbourne highlights the micro-resilience strategies of small manufacturers in gentrifying industrial districts, and the uneven policy frameworks that shape their prospects. Taken together, these essays illuminate how the city’s housing crisis is imbricated with data infrastructures, land-use change, and the restructuring of industrial and cultural economies.

Other recent pieces broaden this picture by situating San Francisco within translocal circuits and everyday economies often sidelined in tech-centric narratives. Sergio Montero’s article on “San Francisco through Bogotá’s eyes” follows the circulation of a video about Bogotá’s Ciclovía and its role in the creation of San Francisco’s Sunday Streets, foregrounding media objects as actors in urban policy mobility and governance. Irene Farah’s recent study of street vending, heterogeneity and selective enforcement examines how informal workers navigate regulatory regimes and policing in contemporary San Francisco, revealing another facet of the city’s contested spatial politics. These contributions remind us that San Francisco is not only a site of high-tech redevelopment and housing speculation but also a place of mundane infrastructures, informal livelihoods and transnational policy entanglements.

Reading across these three broad periods, these articles present San Francisco as a city from which IJURR has offered a diverse set of questions: growth politics and regional governance; the politics of immigration and racial nationalism; immigrant clustering and metropolitan restructuring; foreclosure, gentrification and eviction; data-mediated housing governance; industrial displacement and cultural manufacturing; informal economies and policy mobilities. This collection suggests both continuities—persistent struggles over growth, exclusion and redistribution—and shifts in emphasis, with more recent work taking up the entanglements of housing, data and tech-led urbanism.

The 2026 AAG Annual Meeting in San Francisco offers an opportunity to continue these conversations in person. We especially draw readers’ attention to Erin McElroy’s IJURR lecture, “Technofeudal Fever Dreams: Silicon Fiefdoms, Doom Loop Dystopics, and the Emancipatory Possibilities of Failure” on Thursday, March 19, 4:10pm in Union Square Room 15/16.  Building on their work on dis/possessory data politics, McElroy will reflect on how narratives of San Francisco’s alleged failures underpin new technofeudal fantasies and how ongoing struggles for spatial justice and abolitionist organizing might help drive such projects to fail. We hope that this virtual issue, in tandem with the earlier Northern California collection, provides a useful backdrop for that event and a starting point for further critical engagements with San Francisco in IJURR and beyond.

Liza Weinstein

IJURR Editorial Collective