Mitchell Schwarzer's "Hella Town: Oakland's History of Development and Disruption" (2021) provides a comprehensive story of the city's built environment in the modern era. In this talk, Schwarzer pulls out some of the most poignant moments of that story, the great works of architecture, the wonderful ideas sadly not realized, the projects that had clear benefits but also serious costs and, finally, the callous endeavors that ended up ruining large tracts of the city. Schwarzer is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture at California College of the Arts. He is the author of several previous books as well as over 125 articles and essays on architecture and urbanism.