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    Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake
    Unavailable
    Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake
    Unavailable
    Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake
    Ebook540 pages7 hours

    Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake

    By Joanna L. Dyl and Paul S. Sutter

    4/5

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    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    On April 18, 1906, a 7.8-magnitude earthquake shook the San Francisco region, igniting fires that burned half the city. The disaster in all its elements — earthquake, fires, and recovery — profoundly disrupted the urban order and challenged San Francisco’s perceived permanence.

    The crisis temporarily broke down spatial divisions of class and race and highlighted the contested terrain of urban nature in an era of widespread class conflict, simmering ethnic tensions, and controversial reform efforts. From a proposal to expel Chinatown from the city center to a vision of San Francisco paved with concrete in the name of sanitation, the process of reconstruction involved reenvisioning the places of both people and nature. In their zeal to restore their city, San Franciscans downplayed the role of the earthquake and persisted in choosing patterns of development that exacerbated risk.

    In this close study of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, Joanna L. Dyl examines the decades leading up to the catastrophic event and the city’s recovery from it. Combining urban environmental history and disaster studies, Seismic City demonstrates how the crisis and subsequent rebuilding reflect the dynamic interplay of natural and human influences that have shaped San Francisco.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Washington Press
    Release dateOct 2, 2017
    ISBN9780295742472
    Unavailable
    Seismic City: An Environmental History of San Francisco's 1906 Earthquake

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    • 4/5
      In Seismic City Joanna Dyl makes the important point that so-called “natural disasters” are not created by an earthquake, hurricane, tornado, or other such event alone. Instead, they become disasters due to interaction between the man-made environment and the natural world. In the case of the devastating 1906 San Francisco earthquake, it was the hasty construction of a wooden city on unstable land fill in areas reclaimed from the bay that burned because fires fueled by broken gas lines transformed a natural event into a cataclysmic disaster that claimed the lives of 3,000 humans. This is a well-argued, convincing piece of historical research. In addition to the historiographical argument, Dyl describes the growth of San Francisco, its reaction to the earthquake, it’s tragic toll, the different plans and rival visions for rebuilding, and finally the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition that marked the recovery of the city.