Upper Left Cities: A Cultural Atlas of San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle

Product Description

Compare and contrast San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle through 150 innovative infographic maps that blend traditional cartography with modern graphic design.

Upper Left Cities redefines modern cartography by going into uncharted territory to create a narrative about three great cities through informative and detailed infographic maps.

Explore and compare San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle through:

   • wildlife and city trails
   • voting records
   • commutes
   • marathon routes
   • food and drink patterns
From the team that brought you
Portlandness, this cultural atlas includes more than 150 maps, each using data around a given topic and then translating that to a creative and often unexpected visual format. The result is a perfect blend of form and function, each map is meticulously and ingeniously designed.

The collection of maps cover:

   • history
   • geography
   • social and economic issues
   • pop culture

Review

“The graphics are the key to the book: creative, eye-catching, and sometimes weird (at least one is stitched in needlepoint). But the overall effect is a kind of visual almanac that presents information you can take, interpret, or commit to memory as you wish. This is a digestible way to consume numbers and data points; there is an art to it. The data might not change your view of any of the three cities, but bits will stick to your mental socks like burrs. If you want urban detail and comparisons with ‘sister’ cities — especially in ways you never knew you wanted — this is a book for you.”

—Crosscut

About the Author

HUNTER SHOBE is a cultural geographer and assistant professor at Portland State University. He holds a PhD in geography from the University of Oregon and has more than twenty years of experience researching the cultural, political, and economic dimensions of how people connect to places and environments. Past studies focused on diverse topics, including the role of Football Club Barcelona in constructing urban identity in Barcelona, and national identity in Catalonia.

DAVID BANIS has managed the Center for Spatial Analysis and Research in the Geography Department at Portland State University since 2006, working with a wide variety of partners at the federal, state, and local levels. His work explores the diverse ways that cartographers can tell stories with maps, focusing on the mapping of nontraditional subjects.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

PREFACE
This book grew out of our previous title, 
Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas, in which we concentrated exclusively on the city where we live. After we finished the book, people asked us if there would be a sequel. Maybe another book about Portland? Or possibly one about other cities? We decided to do both.

After spending years mapping and writing about one city, we resolved to compare cities. We were curious about how the big cities on the West Coast were alike and how they differed. Initially we wanted to include Oakland, California, and Vancouver, BC, but we decided to focus our efforts on San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, the major West Coast cities in the northern part of the United States—or what we call the Upper Left.

We attempt to blend academic and popular styles, which is a difficult balance to strike. We hope to bring academic research to people who don’t usually read geography and urban studies journals, and bring storytelling and graphics to people who do.

Each of us has personal connections to these cities.

Hunter traces his personal Upper Left connections to the summer of 1994. That year he had tickets to World Cup games at Stanford Stadium and the Rose Bowl. So he drove from Washington, DC, and spent the summer traveling around California, Oregon, and Washington with a couple of friends. This was his first time west of the Mississippi. Just before the Nevada–California border, Hunter made his buddies pull over on the shoulder of the highway so that he