It's local history, in context. It's about the development Oakland, especially west Oakland near the port. But also about global forces at work.
When I say "local history, in context, for me "in context" was the interesting part; I just read Hella Town, a history of Oakland a few months ago. When this book talks about Oakland history, I didn't necessarily learn much. (Maybe I should have waited a few more months to let Hella Town fade from my memory? Anyhow) But when it steps back and looks at national/international trends, there was stuff that was new to me.
New to me (but probably not to sociologists): The Chicago School. Back when I read Hella Town, it said that city planners back then had some wrongheaded notions about how cities worked; they applied those theories by tearing down neighborhoods in Oakland and it didn't go well for anyone concerned. The Pacific Circuit goes on an interesting wander: What were these wrongheaded notions? A lot of them came from "The Chicago School," academics mostly at U of Chicago who had a good idea: Instead of writing hand-wave-y opinions about how society works, treat it as science, as an ecologist would. Observe and measure what you can, and let that data drive your theory. Darwin figured out a lot by going to the Galapagos Islands and keeping his eyes open. Be like Darwin, but look at people instead of at finches.
Sounds good, right? I bet if I were a wealthy philanthropist back in the day, I would have given all those guys grants.
The Pacific Circuit points out a nasty side effect of trying to be an ecologist-but-for-people: Once you observe and measure a phenomenon, you might think you're observing some inevitable natural force instead of people being stupid. I reckon that was a reasonable attitude for Darwin: It's not like he could ask those Galapagos finches, "Hey, what's with this beakmaxxing trend? Does it help y'all break open tough seed pods, or does it just look amazing?"
The Chicago School people carefully observed Chicago neighborhoods and figured out that some neighborhoods were pretty miserable. These neighborhoods, full of poor black people, were run down with unhappy inhabitants, institutions that fell apart… And these academics thought, "Aha! We have have figured out something fundamental about how cities work!" Some neighborhoods were blighted, doomed to fail. If the academics had asked around, they might have found out that Chicago bankers were bad at their jobs and wouldn't loan money to black folks; and that this in turn led to poor black neighborhoods. But that wasn't the ecologists' way so, whoopsie.
(And now I'm hazily remembering an anecdote from some history-of-cities class I took. Some (German?) scholars looked at a map of their country, and noticed that the placement of towns and cities fit pretty well on a hex grid, with one settlement in the center of each hex, like circles on a Settlers of Catan board. They excitedly reported that they'd figured out something fundamental about how humans settled an area—but then their theory fell apart when anyone tried to apply it outside Europe. Their scientific-looking hex grid was a map of places that were each one day's travel away from each other in mostly-flat terrain back in medieval times. In other regions where a day's travel might be pretty different (e.g. in deserts), you wouldn't get that same regular grid, it was just a side effect of conditions in Germany(?) way back when. Anyhow.)
The book talks about Margaret Gordon, the West Oakland activist and politician who figured out some compromises that kept her neighbors healthy. Freight trucks serving the Port of Oakland were idling in residential neighborhoods, polluting the air, sickening kids. Ms. Margaret and others got the port to come up with another spot for the trucks to idle, far from young lungs.
Other Oakland-y books mention this time; The Pacific Circuit lays out the history that led up to this.
Oakland was one of the first containerized ports. Thanks to newfangled shipping containers, In Oakland, loading or unloading a cargo ship took hours vs days at a port that was still doing everything "by hand."
But But but other changes rippled out from this. At an old-fashioned port, a few cargo trucks could come through and keep up with the cargo being unloaded. Thanks to Oakland's new high-tech cranes and containers, they now needed to move a lot more trucks through to keep up.
Shippers set up a sort of gig economy. They didn't hire full-time drivers. If there was some hiccup unloading a ship and truck drivers were stuck waiting around another hour, shipping companies weren't paying that driver's salary for that hour. Instead, lines of trucks would form at the gates, waiting for work. The truckers didn't want to be sitting around, idling; but they were desperate enough to do so.
The solution wasn't to yell at individual truck drivers. The solution was to get the city to force the port to give the drivers a better place to wait. And to get the city to do that meant learning the the science of pollution, how it affects kids' breathing, and on and on… It wasn't easy; it took years of heroic effort to get capitalism to budge an inch. And it did help.
I think back to a time when I walked from the West Oakland BART stop out to the port. I walked along one section of industrial street and the sidewalk was littered with pee bottles. I wasn't wading through pee bottles, but I was stepping around an awful lot of pee bottles. So trucks had obviously been idling in that area for a long time, long enough such that many many drivers had peed in many many bottles. Truck drivers still have a tough time. It's great that they're no longer idling next to kids' schools; but they're not out of the woods yet.
Anyhow, yeah: good book.
