Gray A. Brechin

Born in 1947, Gray Brechin received his M.A, in Art History in 1976 and his Ph.D. in Geography in 1998 from the University of California, Berkeley, While working as an architectural historian and environmental journalist in San Francisco, a winter spent in Venice in 1985 inspired him to investigate the parasitic nature of cities upon their hinterlands which became his dissertation, then book: Imperial San Francisco: Urban Power, Earthly Ruin. Published by the University of California Press in 1999, the same year that UCP also published his collaboration with photographer Robert Dawson, Farewell, Promised Land: Waking from the California Dream, Imperial San Francisco spent sixteen weeks on the San Francisco Chronicle's best-seller list and is now regarded as a classic in urban studies. Ranging from imperial Rome to nuclear weaponry, it uses one city as an example of how all great cities operate for the benefit of those who own and run them at the expense of the lands and people on which they depend and draw and now at the growing peril of their own existence in the age of climate breakdown for which they are largely responsible. Following the publication of his books, Brechin created the Living New Deal, now a nationwide team effort that is rediscovering and interpreting the vast but largely invisible public works legacy of President Franklin Roosevelt's administrations. In 2023, Brechin recorded and released Imperial San Francisco as an audiobook with an accompanying website that contains many of the graphics so essential to the book's thesis. Brechin is a lifelong resident of the Bay Area and currently resides in San Rafael and Inverness, California. He is a Welsh chauvinist and loves cats.