Reflections on the Marin City Project

What did you learn from the Marin City site that you can apply to the new district you’re working on? What’s similar? What’s different about your current district, in terms of its challenges? What are you trying to add to the flood or fire adaptation ideas, in order to address the decarbonization, justice and jobs challenges of the Green New Deal Superstudio?

In the Marin city project, we worked a lot in community park design with a focus on the animal we chose, which in our case, is Blue Pygmy Butterfly. The scale in that project is limited to the community with little focus on the overall bay area. As I mentioned in my previous post, every community is unique and has its own characteristics, which is something we need to appreciate and honor in our future design. Marin City is honored by its history of being a navy yard, which our group failed to pay attention to it.

For the new project, I choose the whole bay farm island, which is adjacent to the city of Oakland and is the home of Oakland International Airport and some neighborhoods in the City of Alameda.

As its name suggested, my site is an island, or to be more accurate, is a peninsula. And it has a great vulnerability to sea-level rise, noise pollution, subsidence, and possible liquefication which is led by the earthquake in near future. Also, the current land-use pattern on the neighborhood site is inefficient, where the majority of the housing is a single home, with a little apartment complex. And unlike our previous site Marin City, or even the surrounding city Oakland, where is home to the African American/ People of Color community, Bay farm island seems to be a hub for the white middle class.

Also, as a peninsula, the accessibility in Bay Farm Island is highly limited, and this led the community within highly car-dependent, and the accessibility issue also constrains the potential development of the airport, not to mention that the entire airport(both runway and the terminal) will be submerged in a few years thanks to the sea level rising.

With all those limitations in mind, I want to completely replace the existing condition and give the airport and the island a new vision. The first step is to introduce the idea of the floating city. I want to create several floating neighborhoods with both apartments and single homes on site, while the apartment will take more space to increase local density and attract more business. By doing so, many spaces will be left behind, which will be great as a potential site for salt marsh and habitat to a vulnerable bird — Ridgway’s rail. Second, I want to add a new transportation center, which will include a new ferry terminal and part of the airport terminal (as a preparation for the third step). I hope by doing so, this island’s car-dependency will get lower and the connection to the greater bay area will get an increase. And the final step is about the airport, as the airport will be submerged in near future. I want to replace the existing structure with a floating runway and gate combination, where the visitors can either check-in at the new terminal on the island or the one I proposed in the Coliseum area.

Yes, this is an ambitious dream to start with. But as this project is following the guideline from the Green New Deal super studio, and we are asked to vision what our site will be in the 2050s. I think my design is a start point for a long term project, and it will require innovation in construction/material, the collaboration from current residents and the government.

Keeping the airport seems will not help with decarbonization, but we cannot ignore the jobs and capitals brought to the east bay area by the airport.