City of Wood

City of Wood is a masterful work of history befitting the giant redwoods at its center. James Buckley guides the reader from forest to metropolis and through multiple scales of analysis, linking it all together, with gorgeous illustrations, into one breathtaking human landscape.

- Mary P. Ryan, Johns Hopkins University (emeritus), author of Taking the Land to Make the City: A Bicoastal History of North America

With this impressive new book, James Buckley shows just how important it is to take a spatial approach to architectural and urban history. From the great redwood forests of Northern California to the booming city of San Francisco, Buckley guides us through the class-differentiated physical landscapes that capitalists and workers, almost all of them white men, built of wood along the Pacific Coast. The unsparing narrative tracks the devastating effects of unrelenting resource extraction, an assault that decimated ancient forests, and, coupled with industrial production, married the urban core with the countryside, creating a veritable, ever-changing City of Wood. Buckley gives the great struggles between capital and labor their due and tracks the impact of money and material, new technologies, and consumer desire on the modernizing architectural landscapes of the urbanizing West. A great gift of this book is the care that Buckley takes to document the places of everyday life in the City of Wood-the lumber camps, mill towns, docks, lumber yards, planing mills, employer mansions, worker housing, and office buildings-and the attempts to conserve what remained of the grand trees from which they were built, before the forest disappeared entirely.

- Marta Gutman, City College of New York, author of A City for Children: Women, Architecture, and the Charitable Landscapes of Oakland, 1850–1950

Scholars seeking insight into the formation of regional-metropolitan economies will value James Buckley’s expert and artful analysis of nature-capital regimes in northern California’s redwood bioregion. Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, timber titans, financiers, managers, and workers transformed territory into property, forests into fields, trees into logs, and logs into lumber. The author’s encompassing scale and scope support a recalibration of metropole-hinterland relations seen as intrinsically dependent: the former a peak locale for enterprise, trade, and the addition of value, the latter a peripheral location for crude accumulation and entropy. Most ambitiously, Buckley’s findings compel us to redraw our originary maps for today’s “regional urban networks” to include California and America’s West and to reset our timelines accordingly.

- Greg Hise, Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West, coauthor of Eden by Design: The 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region