Next Three Events:
Download the Fall 2025 calendar as a pdf here.
Saturday, December 6, 12–3 PM
Freeway Plan Routes: Unbuilt—After 1989
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. Some of the freeways were partially built, and haven’t stood the test of time, or plate tectonics. Walk from Central Freeway to The Embarcadero with guest guide Jason Henderson, author of Street Fight: The Politics of Mobility in San Francisco, as we explore renewed urban landscapes where once freeways stood.
RSVP to shaping@foundsf.org
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Wednesday, December 10, 7:30pm
Nuclear Waste in our Midst
Public Talk at 518 Valencia
Percolating just out of sight and mind at the former Naval Shipyards at Hunters Point is one of the nation's most severe toxic hotspots. Radioactive debris from the H-Bomb tests in the 1940s and 1950s was brought back to Hunters Point for testing and cleaning. Ensuing waste ended up in the soil. The countless toxic chemicals used in naval operations also accumulated below the landfill, all ready to be pushed back to the surface by rising sea levels and groundwater. Hear from nuclear engineering research scientist and lecturer Dr. Ali Hanks, the Public Press special reporter Chris Roberts, and longtime shipyard artist Stacey Carter, who has produced a fantastic and unprecedented history of the shipyard.
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.