Instructors:
Randy Hester
Tim Duane

Lecture (CCN: 48590) MW 2 - 3 315A Wurster Hall
Studio (CCN: 48596) MW 3 - 6 315 Wurster Hall

Units: 5

The focus of this studio is creating plans, policy and regulation for sustainable development. We will deal with a variety of scales: the small site, urbanizing community, and the active bioregion. We will work as a professional team. The plans we develop will be informed by environmental and social science especially biodiversity and community development. We will address economic development and environmental protection as one. We will make plans that address some of the most critical environmental issues of our time – rising sea level, endangered species, unsustainable urban form, and loss of wetlands, agricultural lands and cultural diversity.

We will give equal attention to visionary plans and planning within cultural realities. The intent is to envision radically different futures yet develop practical plans that are more resilient than present trends. This requires that we first articulate our dreams and then attend to public, private and voluntary sectors while focusing on ecologically sound and impelling choices.

Our laboratory will include California and the world. We will work with people, extensively with and on the land. GIS will inform us. Remote and up-close sensing will be required. We will taste sacred places, fish heads, multiple geometries, environmental justice, conservation biology, gestalts, exotic and familiar food and the politics of sustainability. We will draw, map, plan and design. Neither planning that leads to mushy policy nor design that only addresses superficial symptoms will be tolerated. But planners and designers are welcome. Advanced students from many different disciplines interested in designing for change are welcome. We will have follow-up trips to present our results. Everything in this class will be focused on plan making for real places and real people---so we will be working directly with both.

Tim approaches environmental planning from a broad cross-disciplinary viewpoint with remote mapping, policy, regulation and institutional change as his primary methods. Randy approaches environmental planning from the opposite end: the grassroots and detailed design of locality. His primary methods are the geometries of everyday life, justice and provincial values and the sensual aspects of place. Their collaborative teaching overcomes policy that is placeless and superficial design that misses the big picture issues. The result is the creative integration of large ecosystem thinking and experiential design. In recent years, students have attacked and solved some impossibly complex, difficult, and wickedly political issues.

This spring, we will deal with three place-based coastal problems:

1. The design of a microhabitat bird and eco-tourist center in Taiwan. This is the reward for overcoming an impossibly complex, difficult and wickedly political problem over the past decade – the extinction of the black-faced spoonbill and the fishing culture of Chigu Lagoon. It emphasizes ecological and experiential design at the site scale. This will be a short project as part of the Tommy Church Competition.
2. The planning for land use and levees at the edge of the Sacramento Delta. We will focus on three specific edges: one, urbanization in the Secondary Zone particularly the San Joaquin flood plain; two, the mouth of the delta where subsided islands are being considered for a national park or monument; and, three, the Legacy Towns particularly Walnut Grove and Locke which represent delta subcultures that are vulnerable to catastrophic levee failure. This is this year’s impossibly complex and wickedly political issue, made so by certain flooding and sea level rise, rare and endangered species, affordable housing demands, delicate infrastructure, threatened drinking water for millions of Southern Californians, agriculture, the delta economy and the Delta’s unknowable placelessness. We will develop plans for each of the three identified “edges” and develop policy regarding Delta levees.
3. The development of experimental growth management strategies for Manteo and Roanoke Island, North Carolina. This is an impossibly difficult problem but with dazzling political stewards. All we have to do is make intelligent proposals and they will be stewarded. The issue for Roanoke Island is growth control to protect tidal and upland wetlands, to avoid exceeding water and sewer capacity to maintain a permanent community in the face of a second home takeover, and to shift the town center to protect against sea level rise. We will search for growth control precedents related to each and apply them to island-wide land use planning and town center design.