Rebecca Solnit: ‘Mapping the Infinite City’ — A talk on the ‘infinite trilogy’ of atlases

Rebecca Solnit & Joshua Jelly-Schapiro: Mapping the Infinite City

Wednesday, March 30 from 5:20 p.m. – 7:00 p.m.
San Francisco, CA (Room TBD)

When the trilogy Rebecca Solnit and a host of collaborators launched in 2010 with Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas concludes with the New York atlas co-directed by geographer Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, the teams will have produced three books and 70 maps making postulates about both the nature of cities and the possibilities of contemporary cartography.

This talk will explore what maps can do, or at least what these particular maps do, the ways these projects are counters to the rise of digital navigation and celebrations of what maps did in other eras, and how cartography lets us grasp or at least gaze at the inexhaustibility of every city, the innumerable ways it can be mapped. Session details forthcoming.

Solnit is also the author of several popular books, including Wanderlust, A Field Guide to Getting Lost, The Faraway Nearby, River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Men Explain Things to Me, The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness, among many others. Her writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, The Guardian, and Harper’s, to name a few. She has worked on environmental and human rights campaigns since the 1980s, specifically climate change and women’s rights, including violence against women.