Who Gets to Live in Silicon Valley?
“But Silicon Valley is also a real geographic place, with a real history, where real people live and work—and not just in tech, but also in its shadow. That place can be difficult to describe to folks outside the Bay Area, because as far as places go, Silicon Valley is a pretty banal one. Seen by car (the dominant local mode of transportation), the two counties and dozen or so cities and towns that comprise the region blend into a single, seamless expanse of suburbs, strip malls, and tilt-up concrete office buildings. Starchitect-designed tech campuses have only recently begun to punctuate that monotony. The scarcity of architectural monuments and disorienting car culture make defining the heart of the area challenging. Writing for The Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal once fixed the ‘center’ of Silicon Valley at a storage unit in Sunnyvale.”