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Berkeley’s Future — There are so many reasons to go green!
Increasingly, urban dwellers are calling for the creation of natural, beautiful, functional, and healthy public spaces accessible to all citizens, regardless of age, ability or income. People are also taking greater steps to heal the natural environment within cities. Revitalizing and restoring nature in the city not only helps the environment, but also connects people with place.
Additionally, more people now live inside cities than outside of them. With so many people and so many cities on the planet, it is important for us to become stewards of the natural environment within our urban boundaries. Berkeley’s watersheds are part of a critical “green infrastructure” that supports our community, economy, and environment. Integrating a segment of Strawberry Creek into a “green” downtown center design communicates and demonstrates a commitment to a healthy environment for both people and nature. It will also become a beautiful downtown gathering place, attracting visitors from all over the world. To this end, the project will provide tremendous visibility as a world-class downtown revitalization project with nature as its inspiration.
We believe that a central Green Downtown project featuring a Strawberry Creek Plaza would create a welcoming urban oasis attracting visitors for shopping, recreation, education and enjoyment of a well-designed public open space. Partially due to competition from new big box retail and giant parking lots paralleling Interstate 880, Berkeley is experiencing difficulty keeping downtown businesses viable. Another stated cause of this problem is lack of a sense of place in the downtown that can outweigh the pull of free parking and mega shopping nearer the Interstate. Berkeley can’t compete on the big box scale, so another strategy for attracting visitors is needed to bolster the economy and keep businesses thriving. It may be that the timing is excellent too, as people begin to look for alternatives to car-dependent commerce as gasoline prices continue to rise and oil production world-wide begins its permanent decline. The development of the Arts District is an exciting step in that direction. But the Downtown still lacks a feeling of a central gathering place, a “heart.” A “green” downtown center with Strawberry Creek as centerpiece could provide that missing piece. As one model for the potential success of a strategy that values place over parking, the City of San Luis Obispo’s Mission Plaza and San Luis Creek restoration has unequivocally contributed to bringing the downtown commercial vacancy rate from a low of 60%, to current full occupancy.
A showcase for green design and sustainable development The focus of the project area, Center Street between Oxford and Shattuck Avenue, is the major transit entry to the Downtown and the University of California Berkeley campus, with Strawberry Creek underground nearby. With these elements, and with the Downtown BART station serving approximately 10,000 people every day, there is an excellent opportunity to create a truly spectacular downtown development that will meet the needs of the University, benefit the community, and demonstrate the integration of green building and natural design coming together.
“Green building”—building for energy efficiency, water conservation, reduced environmental impact, and non-toxicity, among other things—is taking off in a big way. Once regarded as a fringe cause of hard-core environmentalists, mainstream America is now starting to “see green” as well.
Helping to green the building industry is the realization that going green doesn’t necessarily require as much expense as was previously believed. And, as more people use green materials, costs drop. But building green is about more than one-building-at-a-time thinking. It is about natural design, relation to the land, the existing built environment, and the creation of healthy environments for the benefit of people and the natural world. |
