Next Three Events:
Download the Fall 2025 calendar as a pdf here.
Sunday, November 2, 2025 12–3 pm
Spirited Tour of Colma Cemeteries
A Bicycle Tour
We take a spirited tour of several massive cemeteries where famous San Franciscans are buried. We'll visit Woodlawn, Home of Peace and Hills of Eternity, Cypress Lawn, and Holy Cross.
We return to Colma or South SF BART together at end of tour.
RSVP requiredand click here to donate in advance!
Photo by Marcin Wichary
Wednesday, November 5, 7:30pm
Auto Row to Robo-cars: A Century of Protesting Carmageddon
Public Talk at 518 Valencia
A look back at the rise of the Automobile on the streets of San Francisco from the 1920s onward… civil resistance on Auto Row in the 1960s, Tesla Takedown this year… the protests of Uber and Lyft drivers and before that the role of cabbies in converting to electric vehicles. And now the streets are full of robo-cars… what does EV saturation mean for daily street life in SF? And public transportation?
With Tenderloin Museum, Safe Streets Rebel, and SF Neon
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Saturday, November 15, 12-3 pm
Freeway Plan Routes: Never Built—Western Freeway
An Urban Walk & Talk
A favorite theme for us to cover, the Freeway Revolt of the 1950s and 1960s, was one of the largest and successful ongoing citizen protests in San Francisco’s history. The revolt against the California Division of Highways’ plan to extend freeways across the city became the first serious opposition in the nation to the post-WWII consensus on automobiles, freeways, and suburbanization. While 19th Avenue technically is Highway 1, the stretch from Stonestown to Golden Gate Park would have been a much different animal had the Freeway Plan been realized. Come with us on foot to find out what might have been lost, and what is hard to experience from an automobile even now.
RSVP to shaping@foundsf.org
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Explore Shaping San Francisco:
Ecology Emerges
Discussions and reflections on the history of Bay Area ecological activism, based on oral histories documenting the past 50 years.
Ecology Emerges is an oral history gathering project to explore the past 50 years of ecological activism in the Bay Area and the role that individual and institutional memories play in the development, policy proposals, and interrelationships that together make up the existing networks of ecological politics. We document the living ecological activist movement, in their own words, but also in a larger context of urban growth and globalization.
Oral Histories
Shaping San Francisco, as part of our ongoing work, sits down with people who have stories to tell and conducts oral history interviews.
Check them out here.
"Editor's Pick Tour" from FoundSF.org
Comprised of over 1,400 pages, and 2,500 historical photos, the wiki-based archive FoundSF.org is the product of hundreds of contributors, regular people who were compelled by the chance to investigate some piece of this City's past.
Shaping San Francisco is fiscally sponsored by Independent Arts & Media, a California non-profit corporation.