An alternative history and geography of the Bay Area that highlights sites of oppression, resistance, and transformation.

“Lavishly produced, with beautiful images and crystal clear prose, A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area is for readers and activists who have taken part in protests and demonstrations for decades, and from Berkeley and Oakland to San Francisco, Sonoma and beyond.”—CounterPunch

A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area looks beyond the mythologized image of San Francisco to the places where collective struggle has built the region. Countering romanticized commercial narratives about the Bay Area, geographers Rachel Brahinsky and Alexander Tarr highlight the cultural and economic landscape of indigenous resistance to colonial rule, radical interracial and cross-class organizing against housing discrimination and police violence, young people demanding economically and ecologically sustainable futures, and the often-unrecognized labor of farmworkers and everyday people.

The book asks who had—and who has—the power to shape the geography of one of the most watched regions in the world. As Silicon Valley's wealth dramatically transforms the look and feel of every corner of the region, like bankers' wealth did in the past, what do we need to remember about the people and places that have made the Bay Area, with its rich political legacies?

A useful companion for travelers, educators, or longtime residents, this guide:

Features over 100 must-visit sites to explore and learn from.
Demonstrates how to read the landscape for historical clues.
Connects multicultural streets, lush hills, suburban cul-de-sacs, and wetlands across the Bay Area.
Covers a wide range of locations, from the North Bay to the South Bay, East Bay, and San Francisco.
Includes original maps to guide readers through the region.
Offers thematic tours—such as The Intertribal Bay and The Youth in Revolt tours—as starting points for creating personalized routes.

About the Author

Rachel Brahinsky is Associate Professor at the University of San Francisco, affiliated with Urban and Public Affairs, Politics, and Urban Studies. Her research is focused on race, property, and urban change.

Alexander Tarr is Assistant Professor of Geography at Worcester State University. His research, writing, and cartography examine the development of cities, food politics, and digital culture.

From Our Blog

Editor Spotlight: Interview with A People’s Guide Series Co-Editor Laura Pulido

Tourism is one of the largest and most profitable industries in the world today. Yet the vast majority of tourist guidebooks focus on a small, elite segment of the population and encourage consumption and spectacle as the primary way to experience a place. These representations do not reflect the re

Reading List for Indigenous Peoples’ Day

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Reviews

"Lavishly produced, with beautiful images and crystal clear prose, A People’s Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area is for readers and activists who have taken part in protests and demonstrations for decades, and from Berkeley and Oakland to San Francisco, Sonoma and beyond. It’s probably worth saying that while Brahinsky and Tarr deserve major credit for this book, they had tremendous help from fellow authors, photographers, designers, colleagues in academia and from librarians and researchers. It takes a collective to bake bread, scones and pizza at Arizmendi. It also takes a collective to write and publish a book of this magnitude, beauty and truth."
— CounterPunch

"If you’ve been staring into the soul-sucking abyss of cable news or doomscrolling through the implosion of American democracy, delving into the stories of anti-eviction battles, Ohlone resistance, strikes, and resilient celebration featured in A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area will provide a welcome glimmer of hope. Not naive optimism, but the kind of tempered determination that comes when you remember how bad things have been before–and how people successfully fought to keep them from getting worse."
— East Bay Yesterday

"A remarkably wide-ranging progressive field guide to the Bay Area, from famous movements like Critical Mass, the leaderless bike ride that has spread to 350 cities around the world, to little-known sites like the Ghadar Memorial, a house in a quiet San Francisco neighborhood where Indian expat revolutionaries in the early twentieth century planned to overthrow British colonial rule, to still-active subcultural spaces like Berkeley's 924 Gilman, a punk/underground/youth oasis for a quarter of a century. A People's Guide to the San Francisco Bay Area offers an alternative, bottom-up perspective on the contested history and geography of this region that's thought provoking, informative, and often surprising."—Gary Kamiya, author of Cool Gray City of Love: 49 Views of San Francisco

"The People's Guide is literally a tour de force of the Bay Area that opens a window to unseen landscapes of popular struggle, heartbreaking loss, and inspiring victories from the grassroots. In place of the usual glorification of big business and builders, this book is witness to the way everyday people shape the city from the ground up."—Richard Walker, author of Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area

"This fascinating book takes you to Bay Area spots you may have walked by every day and reveals their untold stories—from thousand year-old Ohlone shellmounds, to the Oakland headquarters of the first Black-led AFL-CIO union, to a San Francisco hillside where Sandinistas jogged to train for the Nicaraguan revolution. With sparkling prose and vivid photos, Brahinsky and Tarr provide a fresh, richly layered perspective on the region for newcomers and residents alike. I'm going to carry it with me everywhere I go!"—Elaine Elinson, coauthor of the prize-winning Wherever There's a Fight: How Runaway Slaves, Suffragists, Immigrants, Strikers, and Poets Shaped Civil Liberties in California

Media

Watch a panel discussion from the People's Guide Series authors.

About the Book