The view from Cityscape's window, in the Lower Haight
Thanks for visiting sfcityscape.com. My name is Steve Boland, and among other things, I'm an associate planner at
Nelson\Nygaard Consulting Associates, a transportation planning firm headquartered in San Francisco.
This is version 5 of San Francisco Cityscape. Version 1 was basically a blog; version 2 added features including maps, photos and wallpaper, as well as comments; in version 3, the blog and comments were replaced by a forum, and the site was downsized; and version 4 was similar to this one. I mention all this because most who are familiar with this site are most familiar with version 2. For five years, "the online journal of Bay Area urban design," as I called it, was one of only a few websites addressing Northern California planning issues. Nowadays, I'm a practicing planner with little time to blog, and everyone, it seems, has their own Web 2.0 site (the one I'd most recommend to fans of the old Cityscape is Eric Chase's
Transbay Blog). So Cityscape is now essentially an outlet for two of my hobbies: making maps of Bay Area transit, and taking photos of the Bay Area's built environment (and, occasionally, making maps or taking photos of other places). Still, we hope you'll find something here to interest you.
Incidentally, I write the "Urban Drift" feature for the
Urbanist, the monthly newsletter of
SPUR, the San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association. SPUR is — along with
Livable City,
Rescue Muni, the
San Francisco Bicycle Coalition, the
San Francisco Housing Action Coalition,
BayRail Alliance,
Greenbelt Alliance, the
Transportation and Land Use Coalition, and other groups too numerous to name here — one of the nonprofit organizations working every day to make the Bay Area a more just, livable and sustainable place, and that could use your donation.
All of the maps in this section are of my design. While I have no training in cartography, I know a thing or two about Adobe Illustrator, transit systems, and the art of wayfinding. The official maps used by Bay Area transit agencies are good and bad (although I wouldn't call any great). While I wouldn't presume to criticize them too harshly, I don't believe it's presumptuous to present a few ideas, some potential areas for improvement. In any case, my most recent maps are available in PDF format, so you can scale them (if you don't already have Adobe Acrobat Reader,
click here).
While I can make some claim when it comes to the design of semi-professional maps, for me, photography remains strictly a hobby. Nonetheless, digital cameras have made it possible for motivated amateurs to fire away, on the theory that sooner or later one or two shots will turn out (more or less). Lately I've been most interested in panoramic landscape (or cityscape, as it were) photography, partly because I'm drawn to such scenes, but also because if photos of urban streets are what you seek, there are plenty of
alternatives available these days.
This is the one part of the website that I believe is genuinely useful — I know of no other list of links related to Bay Area urban planning and the Bay Area and urban planning in general that is so comprehensive. I've also tried to make it use-able by putting the links in a narrow frame off to one side, so you can easily click through from one site to another. Anyway, please
let me know if I'm missing anything.
