Narrative-Saving San Mateo coast

Saving San Mateo coast is a project to deal with the sea-level rise on the east coast of San Mateo. The plan is intended to be practical in its goal to defend an area against sea-level rise while proving economically feasible, profitable, and sensitive to existing communities living within the area.

Historical Site Conditions

In 1947 before the San Francisco Airport and Silicon Valley, the South Bay was largely undeveloped. All the land located to the east of what now is Highway 101 was either non-existent or very soft marshlands. Today, all the land east of Highway 101 is highly built-up with homes, businesses, and infrastructure. With global warming, coastal communities are facing an increasing risk of submergence. Comparing then and now, it’s no wonder that sea-level rise and flooding is a concern in these low-lying, engineered regions. San Mateo and Burlingame are two cities on the bayfront that must face the risk of coastal flooding and sea-level rise in the next 100 years.

Main Design Concepts

This project utilizes three main design concepts to meet the proposed goals.

1. Build dams along the coast of communities threatened by sea-level rise. Both sides of the dam are paved with green, and along the dam are equipped with wind turbines for power generation.

2. Referring to the case of Tidal City, large golf parks and idle land are replaced by floating houses with wetlands around. In addition, aquaculture and aquatic agriculture areas are placed in the floating house area.

3. Upgrade the original community to microgrid to achieve the goal of decarbonization and energy conservation.

4. Learn from the case of Steigereiland, use the soil excavated from the Golf Park to fill out the large park on the sea surface to maintain the continuity of the biological migration corridor.

5. Imitate German Hafencity to build high-rise residential buildings in the west of the community to improve the housing plot ratio.

Phasing Strategy

The strategy will be divided into five phases, to be completed over 30 years, with all plans to be completed by 2050.

Stage one

Transform the original golf park into ponds and wetland. Build floating house around ponds. For this area, the floating houses will finally have about 675 house units. At the same time, the soil excavated from the golf park is used to reclaim land from the sea, and the insufficient part is added to the treated rubbish for landfill. The new land will be used for building big parks, which, in addition to being playable, will have arable land for agriculture.

Stage two

Half of the residents in the west part will be moved to floating houses and this part of houses will be removed and replaced with tall new buildings. The dyke will be built in this stage.

Stage three

The construction of dyke finished. The houses in the east of the community (Or we can say the houses near the coast)will be removed and this area will be built into a new commercial area, which will have markets and office buildings. In this stage, the construction of part of tall buildings will be completed to accommodate residents of the displaced houses.

Stage four

The construction of the tall-building area was completed, and the middle residential area was transformed. The central residential area is divided into microgrids by blocks. Each microgrid has about 30 houses. The power grid of the microgrid is independent of the central grid. In residential areas, more public green space, disaster shelter, and urban open space should be placed.

Stage five

To improve the community construction, upgrade the block as a unit, put in urban agricultural green spaces, small purification wetlands, and pocket parks. At this stage, the planning and reconstruction of the whole area will basically be completed. The community can start to call for the return of native people and set the tall-building area as an affordable house.

Design details

At the community level, the design will open greenspace, set shelter areas to face flood disasters, build parks and open green space to reduce CO2 production. The tall-building area is an area with sloping slopes. When the sea level rise and the groundwater will threaten houses inside the dike, the water can be driven into the lagoon.

At the block level, there are six strategies. 1. Implement the people-vehicle diversion strategy. 2. Open green space pollution purification. 3. Plan different neighborhoods for different groups of people. 4. Charging piles for electric cars will be set up along the street. 5. Building a water recycling system. 6. Developing urban agriculture.

For the microgrid, each block is a microgrid. They are isolated from the central grid network. Electricity is generated by turbines and solar energy. Part of them is used for community power supply and part of them is stored in the battery. It can be used in the event of a disaster or bad weather. The energy is collected mainly by solar panels and TESLA walls. And the batteries are settled along the streets, for it can be used for charging electric cars at the same time.