designbythebay.com » city planning

Mission Bay and San Francisco’s Future

Sally B. Woodbridge — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:45:03 +0000

A comparison of the following two views of Mission Bay makes it clear that the city depicted in the upper one–an engraving of San Francisco ca. 1860 that shows Mission Bay as the circular inlet in the middle distance–is no longer real to us. Yet the lower, ca. 2000 view is also certain to become unfamiliar as San Francisco continues its southward expansion.

Since southeastern San Francisco is changing dramatically, how will its transformation affect the city as a whole? Will people travel the same routes to the same destinations that made the city famous in the past? Or, will a new city center in Mission Bay turn the old familiar city into what we may call the “museum city.” This transformation will not rob the historic city of its charm and importance, but it may no longer have the dynamism that will characterize the new center.

When San Francisco is depicted in the public’s imagination, its important geographic centers are typically those that were established in the 19th century and remained dominant through the 20th century. They are: the financial district in the blocks around lower Market Street; the commercial areas focused on Union Square and in recent years extended to Mission Street; the hills named Nob, Russian, and Telegraph; and other well known residential neighborhoods: Pacific, and Presidio Heights, the streetcar suburbs such as the Mission and the Western Addition, and the Richmond and Sunset districts, automobile suburbs that began to spread across the city in the early 20th century.

In recent boom times real estate development for office space crossed Market Street, and a new cultural center coalesced south of Market in the 1990s in what is now called SOMA.

Both SOMA and the Central Waterfront district to the south have experienced more or less steady development of market-rate and affordable housing with related commercial activity. The completion of the baseball park in 2000 spurred growth and attracted attention further south to the Mission Bay area.

Yet, the idea of living and working in the barren southeastern flatlands so unlike the familiar and glamorous traditional city to the north did not appeal to most San Franciscans.

Cargo Way/Bay Trail Conceptual Design Study

RCCo — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 21:14:58 +0000

In 2006, the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) coordinating with the Port of San Francisco (Port) received a grant by the Association of Bay Area Government (ABAG) to study improving a segment of the Bay Trail along Cargo Way in the Bayview Hunters Point neighborhood. These Agencies selected RCCo to lead a consulting team to envision the conceptual design and prepare a report documenting the design process. All parties involved collaborated to bring about discussion and design efforts with stakeholders and the community in Bayview Hunters Point.

In addition to addressing the overriding goal of making this industrial boulevard safe and attractive for pedestrians and cyclists while ensuring that it serves the City’s cargo freight transportation needs, RCCo also integrated these other opportunities in the design for transforming Cargo Way:

Improve a three-quarter mile strip of the regional Bay Trail and San Francisco’s Blue Greenway linking the Illinois Street Bridge to Heron’s Head Park.
Provide better access to existing open space at Heron’s Head Park and Islais Creek.
Create a continuous greenway from to Islais Creek to the India Basin Shoreline open spaces including Heron’s Head Park that takes advantage of the required landscaped setbacks that currently exist along Cargo Way on its south side.
Create an attractive entryway into Bayview Hunters Point, India Basin Industrial Park and the Port’s Pier 90 -96 and Backlands
Apply concepts for basic improvements such as street trees, curb ramps, etc. that are consistent with the new Better Streets Plan (BSP) for San Francisco.
Create a model of sustainable, green streetscape design in an industrial area that can guide the design of subsequent parts of the Bay Trail and Blue Greenway.
Design landscaping for the filtering and treatment of storm flows using Sustainable Stormwater Guidelines and Best Management Practices (BMP) established by the SFPUC.

Related Sites:

Greening the Port of San Francisco’s Backlands

Robin Chiang — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 17:56:11 +0000

In the mid-1990s, the Port of San Francisco’s planning and environmental staff collaborated to establish green guidelines for land use and development of the Port’s maritime facilities from Piers 80 to 98. One of the Port’s early moves was to turn Pier 98—bay fill that became a brownfields site—into Heron’s Head Park, a dedicated wetlands habitat. Owned and maintained by the Port, it provides a sanctuary for 78 different species of birds—and an ideal place to study the shoreline ecology of the south waterfront and how its flora and fauna have been impacted by industrial pollution.

The heart of this area is the Backlands, which takes in Piers 90 and 94. The majority of its 47 acres was undeveloped—as bay fill, it required foundations that were too costly for most industrial buildings. The development of Mission Bay forced the concrete and gravel suppliers located there to move to the Backlands. Norcal’s recycling plant was already in operation at Pier 96, close to barge and rail service. Bode’s and Hanson’s new concrete and gravel plants were required by the Port to be green by design and operation. Both plants also take advantage of service from barges and ships. Their open hard surface lots are paved in permeable concrete. Stormwater runoff is addressed by surrounding open areas and parking lots with bio-swales planted with reintroduced native plants.

Bode and Hanson have both made green part of their brands, installing large public displays of their sustainable building products. They jointly sponsored an ornamental garden on Third Street that helps form a green gateway to the Bayview. They also helped defray the cost of cleaning up a former dumping area at the end of Pier 94 to create another wetlands. New soil has encouraged native grasses and shrubs to grow, creating a home for local and migrating birds—a nature preserve in the making. Discarded tires and appliances, long buried by other debris, are removed as they continue to surface.

Green Synergy

The Port’s latest master plan for the Backlands’ 47 acres identifies potential tenants with both the means to build and operations that suit the green program. They are a bio-diesel processing plant and San Francisco Public Utility Commission’s wastewater treatment digesters. The oldest tenant in the Backlands is a tallow company. Due to clean air restrictions, it’s no longer allowed to process the grease it collects from local restaurants, so it’s been shipping the waste to Port of Stockton and from there across the Pacific to China. By locating a bio-diesel plant next door to the tallow company, the grease can be processed locally in a sealed system and then converted to bio-diesel fuel.

Greater synergy will also be realized by relocating the wastewater treatment digesters to the Backlands from their current site in a residential neighborhood half a mile away. The new treatment plant will be able to separate the organics and process them appropriately, either cooked directly into fertilizer or sent to the bio-diesel plant to be turned into fuel. The latter process will use the high concentrations of methane that are a byproduct of water treatment as fuel—another example of the Backland’s “virtuous cycle.”

What’s next for the Backlands? Logically enough, the Port hopes to attract sustainable industries, locating them adjacent to Cargo Way, creating a “green cluster” along the south waterfront. They envision improving public access on this road, which links Third Street to Heron’s Head Park, to integrate the adjoining Bayview district with the regional Bay Trail and San Francisco’s Blue Greenway. By reconnecting the city to the Bay in a way that signals a new attitude toward its ecological integrity, the Port’s efforts are as full of promise in their own way as the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway.

Book Review: Design for Ecological Democracy

Sally B. Woodbridge — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 17:30:16 +0000

This densely written and wonderfully illustrated book seeks answers to questions such as: what is wrong with the cities we have created and what can be done to correct our mistakes? The answers that Randolph Hester explores in chapters headed centeredness, connectedness, sensible status seeking, sacredness, selective diversity, everyday future, reciprocal stewardship, and pacing—among others–come from his many years of working as a political and environmental activist, landscape architect, urban designer, and farmer to improve the physical environment through the creation of forms that celebrate everyday life.

The depressing trends of today’s world: climate change, the loss of cultural and biological diversity, economies that exploit backwaters to create international cities, and the inequities of developing countries, are critical issues of urbanity. Hester observes that, “We sanitize our suburbs, but we still cannot make places where we feel safe. We have lost the balance that makes a city clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.”

Through technology, standardization, and specialization, along with freedom from environmental constraints, we have obtained privately many things that were once only available if shared. In Hester’s view, the social cost of privatization which has altered public discourse and limited the exchange of information needed by the public for responsible actions must be addressed by forging new relationships between the community and the environment.

Our lack of ecological literacy has led us to ignore natural factors in urban design. According to Hester, if cities capitalized on their regional characteristics, they would realize significant income from energy, water, and waste disposal processes while providing their inhabitants with amenities and a sense of place. Instead, we have blurred the vegetative patterns, microclimates, air-movement patterns, and hydrologic cycles that distinguish urban areas and robbed them of any special meaning. As a result we have mistakenly labeled the wildfires, energy shortages, and flood damage in urban areas as “natural disasters.”

The ecological democracy Hester advocates is government by the affected citizenry through hands-on involvement. Since the form of our cities influences our daily lives, the creation of meaningful landscapes for our cities requires a participatory, scientific, and adventuresome design process. Though not likely to produce a quick fix, ecological democracy offers a comprehensive way to act and think about the future.

The preoccupation of cities with raising their status to gain recognition and attract tourism to validate it has been, by Hester’s lights, a considerable waste of time, energy, and money. Blurring the line between healthy self-expression and unhealthy striving has produced the malls, markets, festivals, and historic districts, which are cobbled together and often infused with an ersatz history that obviates genuine needs. Design should help people take root by increasing users’ knowledge and experience of everyday features in which they may take pride. Designers should look beyond project boundaries to reveal nearby connections. Indeed, Hester says, “Connectedness in the urban environment is the most fundamental contribution of applied ecology.”

One example of the benefits of looking beyond project boundaries is Big Wild, which Hester’s and McNally’s young firm, Community Development by Design, began work on in 1985. The client, a state agency called the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, was originally mandated to acquire land in the Santa Monica Mountains Recreational Area. One Conservancy acquisition, the 1000-acre Mulholland Gateway Park, turned out to lack ecological integrity because of its fragmentation. Effective planning required larger boundaries. But even as more acquisitions enlarged the project area, Hester and McNally found it to be ecologcally connected to national forests two valleys away.

Over the course of the next decade, the concept of a greenbelt around Los Angeles evolved. But since the concept of a large region is too abstract to connect to most people’s daily life, the creation of greenbelts requires incremental implementation. A citywide campaign of education and research in conservation biology was instigated to deepen people’s experience of wilderness.

The story of Big Wild features such dramas as the battle to stop a freeway that would sever a wildlife corridor, the expansion of the Mulholland Gateway Park into a 20,000-acre Big Wild and its connection to the creation of a sustainable habitat for mountain lions.

Many victories are described in this book; enough, in fact, to turn designers into environmental activists. But before enlisting in this growing army they might want to consider what they are in for, to wit: varying success in bringing people together to discuss urban environmental issues and managing their heated interaction, defeats and/or long periods of inaction, improvising ways of bridging the doldrums, and never giving up!

In the Epilogue Hester explains how he has interwoven ecology and democracy into a theory of good city form. His theory, he confesses, is “more like a mass of mating salamanders than a regression analysis.” Urban design theory must adjust to the realities of implementation until it becomes meaningful. This process may be unending.

Always modest, Hester describes his projects as having advanced small increments of ecological democracy; they have put project design in an overall framework with a long term vision.

In the book’s last paragraph Hester reveals the secret of his success: fearless optimism. “Optimism,” he affirms, “will help us to shape healthier places to dwell and create the most fulfilling lives we can achieve. And optimism will keep us cheerful along the way.”

The Book at Amazon…

Glen Park Community Plan

RCCo — Sat, 17 May 2008 18:45:09 +0000

The Glen Park Community Plan is one of several planning efforts underway in the City’s transit-served neighborhoods. Glen Park with its BART station is a piece of the Citywide Action Plan to meet the need for housing and jobs.

The Glen Park Community Planning effort seeks to make Glen Park a better place to live and to help Glen Park function better for transit. The long-standing Interest in a neighborhood planning effort for Glen Park increased in response to the 1998 fire that destroyed the local grocery. After the fire, the Planning Department identified grant partners and was awarded a Caltrans grant in mid-2002. After many unavoidable delays, the community planning was started and has culminated in the plan to give the Glen Park community the tools it needs to guide future development in keeping with the neighborhood’s values.

Related Sites:

BART > Glen Park Station > News | Chronology
The official site for BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit.

The Glen Park Community Plan at the San Francisco Planning Department
This community planning process sought to provide the opportunity to balance community needs and address planning issues facing the neighborhood. Planners tackle circulation issues important to the community, including pedestrian safety, traffic flow, access to transit, and parking. Planners also evaluate ways to respect the neighborhood character through zoning, design guidelines, and other city policies. Public improvement opportunities like the use and design of buildings surrounding the BART station, the design and character of streets, and connecting public open spaces and neighborhoods were also explored.

Glan Park Station at Wikipedia
This is the only BART station in San Francisco to have parking.