The scheme forms part of the bay area challenge, a year-long collaborative design program that seeks to bring together local residents, public officials, and local, national and international experts. the initiative will result in ten community-based solutions that will strengthen bay area’s resilience to sea level rise, severe storms, flooding, and earthquakes. As part of the plans, BIG + ONE + SHERWOOD aim to restore islais creek to its natural functioning. According to the team, a small-scale intervention on islais creek could provide an influential framework for the bay area, linking mobility, ecology, and people.
Weaving together natural, industrial, and social ecosystems, Islais Creek becomes dense, connective, and accessible: a resilience model for the entire Bay Area (Courtesy BIG + ONE + Sherwood).
The BIG + ONE + Sherwood Team is co-led by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), One Architecture + Urbanism (ONE), and Sherwood Design Engineers (Sherwood). The team also includes experts from Moffat & Nichol, Nelson Nygaard, Strategic Economics, and The Dutra Group. The Team brings together significant international experience in Denmark, the Netherlands, and the Bay Area with a variety of experience in designing spaces that are vulnerable to climate events by understanding a region’s economic, political and social environment.
Islais Hyper Creek | Islais Creek, San Francisco County
The Islais Hyper-Creek is a vision for the area where ecology and industry co-exist in harmony. A large park with a restored tidal creek system and soft shoreline that shares the area with maritime functions, light manufacturing, and logistics, that have existed in the place for decades. The park plays an important role in building physical and social resilience: it retains, conveys and cleans water, protects the surrounding neighborhoods and provides amenities and benefits to the community. The current industrial functions are consolidated on a smaller area, in clusters of complementary programs. This increases their efficiency and provides new economic opportunities.
“BIG proposes a Social Ecosystem to create a more resilient, sustainable and equitable Islai Creek and South Bay. Together with One Architecture and Sherwood Engineers, we are thinking of ecology, people, infrastructure and transit working together as self-enforcing systems. We’re excited to continue the conversation in not only saving the bay, but growing the bay for nature, people and changing climates”.
The Team is founded on a shared belief in the power of well-designed spaces that are connected to their contexts – ecologically, economically, and socially – and overall play a transformative role in the cities where they are located. With a collective commitment to embrace the interconnected, rich, and diverse set of human and non-human ecosystems that comprise the Bay Area, the team looks at the city as a Social Ecosystem – one where we can proactively design the links between nature, and culture, between people, and their environment.
Six proposed pilot projects, developed together with stakeholders and the local communities, will kickstart a long-term process towards realizing the overall vision.
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