Next Three Events:
Download the Spring 2026 calendar as a pdf here.
Saturday, May 9, 11 am-1 pm
“What’s That Smell?”
Northeast Industrial Mission
A Walking Tour
Shaping San Francisco's own Chris Carlsson, long-time grassroots historian and guide to San Francisco's lost, forgotten and overlooked histories, takes participants on a walk around the old industrial sites of the North Mission. Pungent odors such as ammonia, baking bread, and roasting hops, once common, are now only memories…
Part of the San Francisco International Arts Festival • Buy tickets from SFIAF
Saturday, May 16, Noon-2 pm
Wide Open Town
A Walking Tour
Wide Open Town
A Walking Tour
Author Nan Alamilla Boyd journeys with us through the 20th century San Francisco of gay men and lesbians, examining the culture that developed around the bar scene and homophile activism when the “City That Knows How” became a town where anything goes. Boyd's Wide Open Town is a vivid re-creation of bar and drag life, an absorbing portrait of central figures in the communities, and a provocative chronicling of this period in the country's most transgressive city. Learn about early history of the gay and lesbian civil rights movement prior to 1965 as we walk together along Polk Street and into the Tenderloin.
RSVP to shaping@foundsf.org
We welcome donations. Donate now!
Wed., May 27, 7:30pm
AI and Empire Building
Public Talk at 518 Valencia
We bring together several sharp critics of the hype machine that has long characterized the internet and our successive tech booms, currently blowing up in the AI bubble. Lost in the hand wringing over the more exaggerated claims of boosters and doomers is the ongoing reproduction of a colonial seizure of what should be our common wealth. This process has long historic roots and in some ways it is thanks to our amnesiac culture that the current crop of billionaire investors and tech bros have gotten away with doing it all again. Wendy Liu, Alex Hanna, Tamara Kneese, and Elizabeth Travelslight.
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.