In the introduction to her most recent book, Bay Lexicon, Jane Wolff notes an irony: Just at the moment when urban waterfronts across North America and Europe are being revitalized as public amenities, they’re coming under the threat of sea level rise. The timing may be ironic, but it is also fortuitous. Entertaining a broad audience, these waterfronts are in the public eye in a way they were not a half-century ago. Wolff’s purpose in Bay Lexicon (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021)—which is both a field guide to San Francisco’s shoreline and a case study in establishing a working language for hybrid landscapes—is to enable us to more fully understand what we can now see, so that we may participate intelligently in shaping its future in this era of climate change.

Her method is to develop a common vocabulary for discussing the shoreline where San Francisco meets its bay. “Language,” she writes, “is the first tool for perception: we cannot recognize what we cannot name.” This approach makes Bay Lexicon more than a merely local resource; it offers a model of how any urban waterfront might be opened up to thoughtful and purposeful debate.

Wolff was inspired by recent books that have assembled terms for describing the landscape, including Landmarks (2015), by Robert Macfarlane, and Home Ground (2006), edited by Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney. These works focus on the highly specific, gathering up unfamiliar regionalisms that are in danger of being forgotten, like beck, a northern English word for “stream” (in Macfarlane), or barranca, the Spanish for “cliff or precipice … used in the Southwest and Mexico when referring specifically to the cut or steep bank made by water erosion along the edges of streams, arroyos, or rivers” (in Lopez and Gwartney). A motivating idea of these books is that local knowledge, in its intensive differentiation of conditions, is crucial to the stewardship of the land. Its texture slows us down, which is good in itself, and it enables us to know, when we’re making decisions about the future of a place, that we’re all talking about the same thing.

Wolff, too, wants us to be confident, when debating the future of San Francisco Bay, that we understand in common what we’re talking about. Her approach, however, is different. She is looking for a set of terms that encompasses the natural and cultural systems that have shaped the place: What are the big factors, and how might we identify them?

Some are obvious: to talk about the shoreline, we have to talk about water, and we have to talk about land. The trouble with such terms, however, is that their very familiarity obscures the complexities of the phenomena they name. Part of Wolff’s task, then, is to tease out the complexities. She writes, for example, “The monochromatic definition of water on most maps is matched by what’s in standard dictionaries: water is colorless, odorless, transparent, two parts hydrogen to one part oxygen, usually encountered as a liquid, falls as rain, and makes up rivers, lakes, and seas. But the water at the edge of the bay is neither neutral nor undifferentiated. Its characteristics vary with its origins: some of it comes from the ocean, some from the rivers and streams that drain local hills and distant mountains.” 

Wolff understands well the “rivers and streams that drain … distant mountains.” Her earlier Delta Primer (William Stout Books, 2003), to which Bay Lexicon is a sort of sequel, mapped the complex, contending interests that vie over the waters of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers. These rivers drain close to 40% of the state of California and come together in a meandering, inland deltaic plain, stretching from Sacramento to the Carquinez Strait, through which they open into San Francisco Bay. 

Delta Primer was not Wolff’s first engagement with large-scale water issues. In the 1990s, she received a Charles Eliot Traveling Fellowship from Harvard and a Fulbright to study the history, methods, mythology, and cultural implications of land reclamation in the Netherlands. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, she put this knowledge to use, participating in the New Orleans Dutch Dialogues, a series of community-focused workshops seeking water management solutions modeled on the Dutch approach to integrated infrastructure planning. With University of Toronto colleague Elise Shelley and Washington University professor Derek Hoeferlin, she conducted the Gutter to Gulf studios, developing ideas for a legible water infrastructure for New Orleans. Wolff also authored the chapter on landscape design in The Tennessee Valley Authority: Design and Persuasion (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007), which I edited. 

In Bay Lexicon, Wolf groups keywords in “six categories of thought and activity related to the intense inhabitation of the landscape”: 

• The classification of territory and terrain (land, water)
• The study of the natural world (physics, chemistry, biology)
• The exploitation of resources (defense, commerce)
• The domestication of the environment (navigation, construction, infrastructure)
• The practices of everyday life (work, play)
• The registration of time (interval, souvenir)

“This vocabulary is offered as a model, not a template,” she notes. “The same keywords might not apply to every place, and even if they do, their definitions will vary in different locales.” For example, not every city will have the military history that makes defense an important keyword for San Francisco. What’s important to understand is the process by which Wolff settled on these particular keywords, for this particular place. To do so, it’s helpful to know a little bit more about the earlier book.

Delta Primer expands on stories told in a deck of playing cards that Wolff designed and illustrated. Each suit of the deck represents a way that we might conceive of and use the landscape: as a wilderness, a garden, a toy, or a machine. Each card tells a story. The 2 of Gardens, for example, describes the growing of asparagus, which flourishes in the delta’s peaty soil. The 10 of Machines describes the activities of the Fish Protective Facility, where fish that gather near the intake of the California Aqueduct are captured and trucked elsewhere for safe release. Small details in a broad landscape, but they represent large, often competing, interests: agriculture and wildlife management. The idea is to suggest—and even to offer tokens of—the tradeoffs that must constantly be made in negotiating the use of water. 

Bay Lexicon is a logical extension of Delta Primer, as San Francisco Bay is where the waters of the delta emerge to meet the waters of the Pacific. The book also shares, in its origins, the tactile immediacy of Delta Primer’s set of playing cards. Bay Lexicon began its life as a project Wolff undertook at San Francisco’s Exploratorium, a hands-on science, technology, and arts museum sporting more than 1,000 participatory exhibits. In 2013, the Exploratorium moved from its original location, in the Palace of Fine Arts, to the waterfront, at Piers 15 and 17 on the Embarcadero. Seeking ways to connect with its new bayfront site, it invited Wolff’s participation. She proposed what became a set of 48 oversized flashcards that describe a series of scenes along San Francisco’s shoreline, beginning at Fort Point, beneath the Golden Gate Bridge, and moving clockwise around the shoreline to Hunter’s Point, near the city’s southern boundary. Visitors to the Exploratorium will find Wolff’s flashcards in the Fisher Bay Observatory Gallery, which offers panoramic views of the city and the bay and is, as its curator explains, “an entry point for investigations of the history and dynamic processes in the local landscape.”

The 48 flashcards form the basis for Bay Lexicon, where they are reproduced, and it is through the intersections among them that Wolff has identified keywords. The flashcard about cracks in a wall, for instance, invokes biology, defense, infrastructure, land, and water. Even though most of the book’s readers may never visit the Exploratorium exhibit, it is pivotal to Wolff’s approach, not only to identifying the keywords, but also to engaging the public. The museum offers a resource that most authors can only wish for: an actual, rather than an imagined, audience—and a well-understood audience, by a staff that welcomes more than a million visitors annually. Working in this context, Wolff has proceeded in a way that those of us who write about the built environment might do well to emulate. Her entry points are simple and direct. Familiar objects anchor the 48 scenes: sailboats and cargo ships, stairs and piers. The scenes prompt questions that a curious child might ask: “Who steers ships into the harbor?” “What brings water to the tap?” “Why do walls crack?”

Wolff’s skill can be seen in how she leads the reader from these elementary starting points into a deeper understanding of the forces at work in this landscape. Take, for example, how she gets from cracks in a wall to public-policy insight:

… retaining walls don’t stop movement in the ground. Soil settles slowly with gravity and suddenly with earthquakes. Water flows through pores in the soil. Tree roots claim space as they grow. Shifting earth cracks the walls; colonized by plants that like dry, rocky soil, the cracks grow and spread. Untended, the retaining walls would lose their hold on the hills. Retention requires maintenance: a wall’s durability depends on the work of the person who patches it. Infrastructure consists of practices as well as objects—and practices, unlike objects, can respond to changing circumstances.

Bay Lexicon’s purpose is to enable San Franciscans to respond, collectively and civilly, to changing circumstances. In the process, it offers an enjoyable and informative introduction to the city’s relationship with its waterfront, from its Gold Rush beginnings to the present. But it is also worth consulting by anyone who aspires to engage citizens in any waterfront city’s response to a rising sea level—or, really, any complex issue, anywhere, involving the dynamic life of a landscape. As Wolff puts it in her Afterword, “Bay Lexicon is a manifesto, an argument that the observation, documentation, and discussion of landscapes as we find them are necessary steps toward informed public decisions about the future.”

Featured image via Wikimedia Commons.