Exit Zero: An Atlas of One City Block Through Time
https://people.ucsc.edu/~stopiary/ExitZero/#--_Exit_Zero_startpage
Exit Zero: An Atlas of One City Block Through Time is a web-based, interactive documentary (i-Doc) about a single central San Francisco city block and the site of multiple, dramatic urban transformations. The block—once in the center of a vibrant multi-ethnic Victorian neighborhood—was transformed into a freeway exit, subsequently damaged by earthquake, then became an “interim-use” community garden, and is today the site of a “green-living” apartment complex.
Using the microcosm of a single city block, Exit Zero allows users to navigate across time periods and explore poetic connections through history using the interactive “metaphor compass” interface. As a synecdoche of the dynamics of hyper-gentrification plaguing San Francisco today, Exit Zero invites its audience to get tangled in a web of interconnections that lay bare the legacies of racial and environmental injustice to offer a complex view of San Francisco’s history and identity as a progressive vanguard.
Mapping the dynamics of change and placing competing narratives about sustainability in counterpoint with mobility, from pre-Colonial Ohlone territory, to the tech-informed Gold Rush of today, Exit Zero allows the past to speak to the present.
