When Shells Crumble

Chris Carlsson, co-director of the "history from below" project Shaping San Francisco, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the seminal and infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. In 1995 work began on "Shaping San Francisco;" since then the project has morphed into an incomparable archive of San Francisco history at Foundsf.org, award-winning bicycle and walking tours, and almost two decades of Public Talks covering history, politics, ecology, art, and more (see shapingsf.org). Beginning in Spring 2020, Carlsson added Bay Cruises along the San Francisco shoreline to his repertoire. Carlsson has written three previous books, the most recent being Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020). His 2004 novel is set in a future "post-economic" San Francisco (After the Deluge, Full Enjoyment Books: 2004), and his groundbreaking look at class and work in Nowtopia (AK Press: 2008) which uniquely examined how hard and pleasantly we work when we're not at our official jobs. He has also edited six books including three "Reclaiming San Francisco" collections with the venerable City Lights Books. He redesigned and co-authored an expanded Vanished Waters: A History of San Francisco's Mission Bay after which he joined the board of the Mission Creek Conservancy. He has given hundreds of public presentations based on Shaping San Francisco, Critical Mass, Nowtopia, Vanished Waters, and his "Reclaiming San Francisco" history anthologies since the late 1990s, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.