Best of the Bay 2012: BEST OPEN SOURCE UTOPIA

Pub date July 25, 2012
SectionSpecial

“We’re giving tax breaks to companies that allow people to meet in a virtual space,” Erick Lyle told the Guardian prior to the opening night of Streetopia, a multidisciplinary, utopian community art festival that he, Kal Spelletich, and Chris Johanson curated. “But this event will really show the vibrancy that is right here.” In the battle to keep the second tech bubble from edging everyone else out of the city, Streetopia was proactive, asking its participants not for dire predictions, but to share images of what their utopian SF would look like. For more than a month, there were classes on civilian investigative reporting taught by working journalists, dance performances in the street, shared meals in the Tenderloin National Forest, art in empty storefronts, and much more — proof positive that a San Francisco which doesn’t require stock options of its inhabitants is still very much thinkable and alive.

www.streetopiasf.com