Making the Left Coast

Richard Walker has played a crucial role in shaping our understanding of the Bay Area. A prolific author, educator, and advocate, he has helped us see how the capitalist system has remade the region in its interest but also how ordinary people have mobilized to fight back. His latest book, Pictures of a Gone City: Tech and the Dark Side of Prosperity in the San Francisco Bay Area, is a comprehensive survey of the high-tech boom. He describes the stresses and injustices that it bears as well as its fault lines and vulnerabilities. Although he writes in a popular, accessible style, his work rests on sophisticated ideas about how the world operates and where it is going. Whether or not you share his conclusions, his reflections can help us explore the big questions that local radicals—and radicals anywhere—must address in order to transform society. In this interview, I ask Walker a series of questions designed to provide some context for understanding his work. We talk about his personal and intellectual evolut