Geography faculty David Banis and Hunter Shobe co-authored soon to be published book

This book grew out of our previous title, Portlandness: A Cultural Atlas, in which we concentrated exclusively on the city where we live. After finishing the book, people asked us if there would be a sequel. Maybe another book about Portland? Or possibly one about other cities? We decided to do both. After spending years mapping and writing about one city, we resolved to compare cities. We were curious about how the big cities on the West Coast were alike and how they were different. We decided that Los Angeles did not fit with the others, but initially we planned to include both Oakland and Vancouver, BC. However, we eventually decided to focus our efforts on San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, the major cities in the northern part of the United States West Coast—or what we call the  Upper Left.

In this atlas, we place San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle in a more specific subsection of the Left Coast⁠—the Upper Left. We think the shared cultural identities of these three cities and their surrounding areas deserve a special designation. The Upper Left is an emerging term, a fuzzy concept still coming into view. With this atlas, we hope to make this term more distinct.

San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle have each been the “it” city. Each city was launched into the popular imagination of the country at different times—San Francisco during the late 1960s and 1970s, Seattle during the 1990s and Portland during the 2010s.

As we did with Portlandness, we blend academic and popular styles, which is a difficult balance to strike. We hope to bring academic research to people who don’t usually read geography and urban studies journals and bring storytelling and graphics to people who do. Upper Left Cities explores a combination of current issues in specific places while also examining a number of non-traditional topics and employing many non-traditional mapping styles meant to both inform and entertain the reader.

We worked on the book for over 5 years and in the process collaborated with more than 30 students and alumni as contributors. A special thanks to Zuriel van Belle (MS 2015) who was there from the start, and Geoff Gibson (BS 2013) and Sachi Arakawa (BA 2016) for their substantial contributions.