I'VE TAUGHT A lot of classes on San Francisco political history, and I always try to start off with my basic, far-reaching, overly broad, and possibly indefensible (while entirely true) Unified Theory of Modern Urban Conflict, which goes like this:

There are two ways of looking at a city like San Francisco, and they're fundamentally incompatible. Some people see the city first and foremost as a center of commerce, a place from which to extract wealth. San Francisco, the metropolis, grew rich from what its early residents pulled out of the ground (with environmental damage that remains to this day), and while real estate has replaced gold and silver as the source of speculative wealth these days, the attitude – grab the quick riches and run – remains.

But some of us take a different approach, and look at a city first as a place where people live – and interact, and make art, and write poems, and fall in love, and go for walks, and teach, and learn, and do all the things that make cities the crossroads of culture and civilization. If you think that way, then you make different decisions about things like land use and development. You might protect land that's not at its highest and best economic use just because you like to look at the trees. You might conclude that a developer's right to make a gigantic profit is less important than the rights of immigrant families and low-wage workers to stay in a working-class neighborhood. You might realize that progress has a price, and that it's not always worth paying.

I would argue (and I do, all the time) that the clash between those visions is at the heart of every major political battle in this city, and it's been that way for a long, long time.

And since this issue includes our first annual Small Business Awards, I want to add another sweeping generalization:

Overall, big out-of-town corporations and chains are far more likely to see the city as a place from which to extract wealth, and small, locally owned businesses are much more likely to see it as a place into which to put the human and economic efforts that are needed to build community.

Not all of them, not everyone ... there are clearly some greedy jerks running small shops. But as a framework for looking at urban economics, it's not that far off base.

Tim Redmond tredmond@sfbg.com