ENV DES 201, Fall 2008
Associate Professor Elizabeth Macdonald

Project #1: San Francisco Bay Area Transect
(With Professor Peter Bosselmann)

As the first class in the program, the urban places design studio introduces incoming students to the San Francisco Bay Area and to the range of scales that are common in urban design practice. We begin by learning to understand the constructed and natural elements of the region and ask how changes to metropolitan form can be directed. In the first assignment we laid transects starting at the Campanile on the Berkeley campus, projecting in straight lines along the cardinal directions towards the edges of the metropolitan region. Students traveled along each transect and selected station points every five miles. At each station point they described landform, water, settlement, and vegetation. Through diagrams, words, images, and numbers students described an inventory of metropolitan form and discussed design strategies. For example, students concentrated urban form to contribute to existing or emerging centers, they established ecological corridors from the Bay to the crest of the hills following creeks and rivers, and they traced transportation corridors to intensify the use of the land.
 

Project #2: An Urban Structure Framework for the Luokou District in Jinan, China

This project involved creating an urban structure framework plan for the Luokou District of Jinan City, China, focused on sustainability and transit-oriented development.

The Luokou District comprises 3.3 square kilometers at the northern edge of the developed city. We had the opportunity and challenge to develop an alternative plan to one that has been prepared by the local authority, which may be characterized as having very large blocks, large streets, and large slab buildings. Making use of data gathered by the UC Berkeley Global Metro Studies Team this last summer as part of the Energy Foundation's China Sustainable Cities Initiative, we wanted to see if we could do better than what has been proposed. The urban structure framework plan that we prepared explores the possibilities of smaller blocks, pedestrian-friendly streets, green infrastructure, transit-oriented development around BRT lines, adapting Chinese solar codes to making perimeter block development, and the re-housing of existing residents (factory workers, metal gathers and recyclers, and farmers — up to 30,000 of them) within the larger anticipated population of 130,000.

The students' charge was to prepare an urban design vision for the Luokou District.

Group 1

Group 2

Project #3: A Public Realm Plan for San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf

The students worked with the San Francisco Planning Department's City Design Group to prepare urban design visions for San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf area.

Fisherman's Wharf is one of the busiest areas of San Francisco, an icon of the city for many visitors, but which functions more as a center for outsiders than for San Franciscans. Can it be for both? Our work focused primarily on creating a vision for the public realm of Fisherman's Wharf, with attention paid to creating a green infrastructure, the integration of vehicle, bike, and pedestrian movement, and the development of a continuous waterfront promenade.

The charge was to prepare a conceptual public realm plan for Fisherman's Wharf.

Funn Chantanaphan

Rebecca Finn

Dario Schoulund

Brinda Sengupta

Jassu Singh