Case Study from RESILIENT BY DESIGN BAY AREA CHALLENGE

The “Design Resilient Bay Area Challenge” brought together 9 multidisciplinary design teams to develop resilient solutions to cope with the impact of sea level rise, severe flooding and earthquakes in various locations around the San Francisco Bay caused by climate change. With the support of the Rockefeller Foundation, the Trust for Conservation Innovation (Trust for Conservation Innovation) invited the design team and the local community to conduct a collaborative research phase in the fall of 2017. Then, starting in 2018, each team was assigned to a separate site to create the conceptual design.

Landscape architects, architects, planners, engineers, scientists, and others work with community members to develop designs. They understand that climate risks and social justice challenges often coexist. These teams not only studied how to make the community more adaptable to future material shocks, but also how to solve the problems of gentrification and displacement, fragmented governance structure and insufficient infrastructure.

9 Project sites

I learned about this website because of the “Tidal City” project. In the first few critics of Assignment4, I once came up with inappropriate strategies such as building linear pastures by the bay and floating cities on wetlands because I did not understand the policy and the culture of the Bay Area. And I also do not know what kind of occupations in the USA are well-paid and attractive to local labor. Kristina suggested that I should do some research and figure out what kind of landscape armature the Bay Area needs to help residents achieve the goal of “decarbonization, occupation, justice” when facing a future threatened by sea level rise. This website has given me a lot of enlightenment and inspirations and has given me a lot of background knowledge in the era of remote instruction. Although my selected sites-Rodeo is not among the nine sites, but in the northeast of Richmond, I can see some sharing problems and appropriate solutions that they all have. I will pick two or three of them to introduce.

ISLAIS HYPER-CREEK

Islais Creek is located in the bay of San Francisco’s southeast coastline, with Creek Valley and mountains to the east. This area is a complex area for communities, industrial clusters and infrastructure functions. It is essential to the functional development of the city.

In 1860, Islais Hyper Creek was the largest freshwater body in the area, with a large area of ​​marsh wetlands. By 1900, these naturally wet, flat land was used. Because of the development of industry and deep-water port business, people laid facilities and pipelines to replace natural erosion, and the rivers gradually decreased. With climate change, these infrastructure systems make the land occupied by them increasingly tense, and earthquakes increase the risk of groundwater rise. More intensive rainfall makes the drainage system more and more overwhelmed. At the same time, rising sea levels and storm surges will make the water nowhere to go. The entire area is facing the risk of torrential floods and liquefaction. The area is an important infrastructure hub for the entire city, a shipping center, a city wholesale product market, a wastewater treatment plant that treats 80% of San Francisco’s sewage, and many other supporting businesses for construction, manufacturing, and handicrafts. Currently providing 22,000 jobs. If it stops due to catastrophic shock, the city of San Francisco will cease operations. Therefore, through the redistribution of land, the natural rivers of the entire basin are restored, and the natural, industrial, and social ecosystems are integrated on the limited land, so that the entire Islais Creek becomes more elastic, connected, and accessible.

The core element of Islais Hyper-Creek is a natural creek. Its restored watershed absorbs millions of gallons of rainwater each year while providing multi-level ecosystem benefits. The public spaces along the river corridor provide recreational facilities, reconnecting the area to the historic waterfront.

In addition to the creek itself, Islais Hyper Creek is a holistic, district-wide plan. Existing industrial operations in nearby areas were gathered, merged, and intensified, thus creating important work and logistics centers that depend on the industrial economy. Infrastructure (including logistics and port functions) has been strengthened to adapt it to floods and earthquakes. The creek merges natural, industrial, and social ecosystems into a dense, connected, and reachable area.

The BIG + ONE + Sherwood team, together with Islais Hyper Creek, proposed a strategy that integrates protective and adaptive measures on the coastline, and performs ecological restoration and economic growth throughout the basin, while also improving social adaptability. They highlighted six potential pilot projects to initiate the long-term vision of establishing a resilient Islais Hyper Creek. These include:

Islais Creek Gateway:

The underutilized land at Pier 90 can be naturalized into a soft coastline to better cope with storm surges, creating a gateway park to Bayview and a space for vertical industrial accumulation along the iconic granary, thus starting to face the southern edge of the river Carry out long-term naturalization transformation.

Living levee:

At the Southeast factory, a natural treatment system can be tried out along the creek, using wetlands to treat wastewater, and combined with the future decoration of the factory itself, thereby creating space for much-needed leisure places and educational opportunities for nearby communities.

River Park:

Along Cesar Chavez Boulevard, the existing vehicle stacks can be placed and placed in future regional facilities, thereby creating space for Daily Creek along the historical path, and for the waterside along the shore Life provides opportunities.

SF Food District:

The San Francisco agricultural product market will be modernized in the future by merging other functions, which will help initiate the creation of future food and clean logistics districts in the center of the basin. There, the production, storage, sales and enjoyment of products in the area will converge and become Bayview’s new destination.

Living with water

The Alemanni Farmers’ Market is located at a key location in the stream. By rethinking the site, we can double the space for water. Next to it is a new market and elevated housing space, and the adjacent plot below the highway can also be used as a parking space and a reservoir to double the water capacity.

Innovative Cove

On the Gulf Coast, the land surrounding the warm water bay can help expand the city’s waterfront network to the southeast, providing an innovative hub for new innovative docks, research facilities for local business incubators, and flexible floating building experiments.

Over time, each of these pilot strategies can grow into a coordinated long-term strategy to suit the supernatural and superurban needs of the region.

THE GRAND BAYWAY

Highway 37 is a low-lying commuter route located on the northern edge of San Pablo Bay. Due to rising sea levels, traffic jams and flooding. Dr. Fraser Schilling of the Road Ecology Center at the University of California, Davis, observed that the highway is located on a dangerous embankment confined to a huge but damaged swamp area. “This highway has a The suspicious feature, which restricts both traffic and tidal flow. The project considered the new future of this highway, using it as an elevated scenic track, creating a landmark “front door” that leads to a huge ecological open space. Few people knew before. For cyclists, runners, kayaking enthusiasts, campers and fishermen, Grand Bay will become a 21st century central park for the rapidly expanding North Bay community.

The project solved the traffic problem of Highway 37 by designing a landscape causeway on a 20-foot-tall pillar, restoring tidal currents and swamp migration to their natural state. These principles are the same whether in the current southern line or moving along the edge of a stable highland to another northern line. Like other iconic cross-bay passages, the design of the causeway has the same ambition and talent, but based on the 21st century’s sensitivity to the natural environment and multiple types of traffic (not just vehicles). This design is based on the principles of landscape path design, rather than a wide concrete platform on a forest of pillars. The curved angle opens up the view of the bay and marshes, facing natural landmarks. The direction of the lane and the bay trail are “unwinded”, flowing independently like the mud they traverse, creating access to the open space below. The level of investment in design and visibility of this ecological “central park” will bring important value to the area, its identity and the future. A huge motorized loop line will include open space, including sidewalks and bicycle lanes, paired with short-distance trains using existing freight lines. Visitors will arrive at “ghost cities” where various historical trains stop, such as Buchli and Wingo. These ghost cities have been revived for cultural education, using the stories of people who lived on these lands in the past. The huge Bellandes complex is of course inseparable from the highway solution. In response to rising sea levels, the project proposes to create an ecological laboratory to work strategically with rivers and ditches to gradually reuse sediment deposits and cultivate biodiversity in various ways, including “sediment trains” , Super-growth gardens and floating wetlands.