Some notes on Brechin

Gray Brechin, Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin (Berkeley: U of California Press, 1999).

“Contado” in this ‘cultural studies’ approach to urban space means the expansive space of SF’s vast urban-to-suburban-to-rural periphery (the “hinterlands” of the countryside) providing the city core with material resources (water, timber, stone, agriculture, shipping and so on) as well as huge labor needs and inputs to build up the wealth and splendor of the “imperial city” a la Rome or Constantinople.

This “Contado” framework goes far beyond the 47 square miles, 43 hills, and 800, 000 population of physical San Francisco city to High Sierras, Silicon Valley and Big Sur if not to Alaska and Pacific Rim and Mexico for resources and its survival as an economy and a life-sustaining bioregion.

For example, consider that Hetch Hetchy Reservoir [completed in 1934] water is tunneled and piped 160 miles westward to SF and provides 85% of water for SF residents. [See map in Imperial San Francisco]

Consider Silicon Valley as another expansive and transformative “contado”: SF has become by now the world’s fourth most important “city-region” on the cutting edge of global techno-financial economy (after NY, London, Tokyo), based on maintaining ‘edge’ in techno-knowledge economy as a “global hub for business and innovation” and “magnet” to creative and talented people.

“Italians, with their long experience with city-states [like Rome], have understood this relationship [between city and countryside “hinterlands”], though more in economic than ecological terms. For them, the civilized world was a duality made of the city and its contado—that is, the territory that the city could militarily dominate and thus draw upon. The contado provided the city with its food, resources, labor, conscripts, and much of its taxes, while its people (the contadini) received a marketplace and a degree of protection” (Imperial San Francisco, p. xxiii).

“No arena on the planet is now free from the process of global urbanization, wilderness has ceased to exist” (Brechin, Imperial SF, p. xxii).


Sounds like the rural fishing abodes and trout streams of Brautigan?


Brechin’s key methodological sentence: “Power [of urban empire-building] veils itself” (Imperial SF, p. 71).

How does power and control and influence “veil itself?:

via sublimating mythologies and histories centered in narratives and tropes of aggrandizement and conquest (“pioneer” settler storeis; gold rush lone miner figures of the Golden State; versus the hydraulic mining apparatus and the huge financial capitalist investment involved in placer and hydraulic mining).

via architectural and pictorial monumentality and sublimity of epic romance and wilderness preservation; the gold coated urban splendor of the city and its city hall and museums and statuary etc.

via “displacement” effect of shifting the costs and damages of this imperial buildup of grandeur and growth to urban peripheries and hinterlands as well as down to later generations to deal with the effects (“earthly ruin” is shifted down time and space in a process of “downwind, downhill, and downstream” movement (p. 27).

via “invisible” structures and dynastic patterns of domination and hegemony over the city space and its peoples and history: what Brechin calls the inverted “pyramid of mining” spread across a huge urban contado via “remote control of power” and the workings of “phantom capital” (97), as with the urban skyscrapers as inverted mine-scapes with the dirt, labor, and death hidden from everyday urban view (pp. 68-70 ff.).

e) Brechin activates a process of denaturalization/defamiliarization of SF urban-scapes and romantic frontier history to expose the “imperial splendor” as a feat of “urban ruin” and social immiseration to many of the have-nots or the marginals in this grand urban space where so many live homeless.