The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project’s (AEMP) work is inspiring for activist cartographers and mapping activists in a number of ways: its strategic use of maps to accuse the manifold forms of oppression in neoliberal urbanization; its commitment to local communities and underrepresented spatial subjectivities; and its involvement with multiple (artistic, scientific, tech…) means of activist action. AEMP now announces the launch of their print atlas, Counterpoints: A San Francisco Bay Area Atlas of Displacement and Resistance. This atlas, we believe, has the potential to instigate social justice struggles in cities worldwide.
Counterpoints is a 320+ page, full-color, large-format atlas that tells the story of the forces transforming the San Francisco Bay Area in a radical new way. Their campaign on Kickstarter is still runnning until the end of september, so that folks can preorder copies and help raise funds to print more books and sell them at affordable prices.
Counterpoints combines work from within the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project with contributions from dozens of local artists, organizers, scholar-activists, and residents–from longtime community members who have been fighting multiple waves of racial dispossession to elementary school youth envisioning decolonial futures. As an atlas co-created with community, Counterpoints expands knowledge on displacement and resistance in the Bay Area with, rather than for or about, those most impacted.
Counterpoints is organized around seven thematic chapters: (1) Evictions and Root Shock; (2) Indigenous Geographies of Resistance; (3) Health and Environmental Justice; (4) Gentrification and State Violence; (5) Transportation, Infrastructure, and Economy; (6) Migrations/Relocations; and (7) Speculation and Speculative Futures. These chapters, chosen based on AEMP’s years of work in the Bay Area, together provide a more regional, historically grounded, and multiply situated perspective for understanding the complexities of living in and fighting for space in the Bay Area than ever available before. From settler colonialism to the Tech Boom 2.0, Counterpoints gives readers the data, stories, analyses, and inspiration needed to fight for urban justice in the contemporary world.
See some images from the book below. Purchase your own book, ebook, and/or hardcover copy, and also check out housing justice swag here!
To get to know more about AEMP’s work, check out their contribution to Not-an-Atlas. To see how AEMP maps housing justice struggles in times of the pandemic, visit the crowd-sourced online map Covid-19 Global Housing Protection Legislation & Housing Justice Action and add data from your location to it!
