I'm Susie Wiseman and this is Jacobin Radio. In this episode, we talked to scholar activist Richard Walker

about his new book, Pictures of a Gone City.

The book is an urban geography for our times,

one that is both a sweeping account of the Bay Area as the

world's tech capital and gushure of wealth, as well as its dark side of overheated

bubbles, spectacular crashes, exploding inequality, underpaid workers, a boiling housing crisis,

mass displacement, and severe environmental damage.

It turns out that the miracle of Silicon Valley, including the sometimes delusional ideas behind

the tech boom, carries a heavy price paid for in terms of unaffordability, traffic paralysis,

environmental disruption, as well as the political challenges and the movements it has spawned.

We then speak to Jacobin's Matt Karp, who evaluates the importance of the midterm elections and the politics of the Democratic Party,

who went after suburban voters in this election.

All this when Jacobin Radio returns in just a moment. Welcome to Jack

Jackman Radio. I'm Susie Weisman and I'm really pleased to have Richard Walker back with us.

He is a scholar and an activist, a professor emeritus of geography at UC Berkeley.

He now divides his time between Berkeley and Burgundy, and that just sounds so attractive. He's a widely recognized expert on

California and the author of many books on California and other topics as well

but let's go over those the conquest of bread 150 years of agribusiness in

California that came out in 2004 the country in the city 2007 and an Atlas of California facing the challenges of a new era in 2013.

Dick Walker is now the director of the Living New Deal Project whose purpose is to inventory all new deal public work sites in the US and

recover the lost memory of government investment for the good of all.

And he's joining us now to discuss his latest book, Hot Off the Press's a few months ago, called

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