Chris Carlsson, co-director of the “history from below” project Shaping San Francisco (shapingsf.org) and its incomparable archive FoundSF.org, is a writer, publisher, editor, photographer, public speaker, and occasional professor. He was one of the founders in 1981 of the infamous underground San Francisco magazine Processed World. In 1992 Carlsson co-founded Critical Mass in San Francisco, which both led to a local bicycling boom and helped to incubate transformative urban movements in hundreds of cities, large and small, worldwide. Carlsson has written three books: Hidden San Francisco: A Guide to Lost Landscapes, Unsung Heroes, and Radical Histories (Pluto Press: 2020); his 2004 novel set in a future “post-economic” San Francisco, After the Deluge (Full Enjoyment Books: 2004); and his groundbreaking look at class and work in Nowtopia (AK Press: 2008) which uniquely examined how hard and pleasantly we work when we’re not at our official jobs. He has also edited six books. He has given hundreds of public presentations, and has appeared dozens of times in radio, television and on the internet.
