(DRAFT by Rob Thayer, 7/9/06; edited by Alethea Harper 7/25/06)
Water, Oil, and Wine:
Regional Planning and Design for a Post-Fossil Fuel Napa Valley
During the Fall Semester of 2005, graduate students in landscape architecture
and environmental planning focused their efforts on long-range planning for the
entire Napa River watershed. However, their charge was somewhat beyond the
ordinary.
The Napa River Watershed drains into San Pablo Bay, and is home to the world
famous wine region of Napa Valley as well as several small to moderate sized
cities. With its headwaters at Mount St. Helena, the Napa River flows from wild
slopes of the Mayacmas Mountains through picturesque vineyards toward and
through the City of Napa and out past Mare Island and the city of Vallejo to San
Pablo Bay. One of the most memorable and well-known geographic features in
California, the Napa Valley is a highly compact watershed ranging from near
wilderness to rural lands, to suburbs, to cities, to industrial zones in a mere fifty
miles.
Beneath the surface of this apparent paradise is a web of relationships highly
dependent on fossil fuels. From the natural gas providing electricity to homes,
wineries and businesses to the oil providing gasoline for vehicles, and the
petrochemicals for agriculture, the valley is held captive by the fossil fuel era.
Like all regions of North America, the Napa Valley will of necessity undergo a
very serious transformation to a post-fossil fuel reality. A compact, thriving
watershed region like the Napa Valley allowed the class a laboratory to explore
the patterns of land use and landscape that may emerge in the wake of declining
fossil fuel supplies and the realities of global warming. The class presumption
was simple: In thirty years, everything will change. Their job was to anticipate
that change and guide it in constructive, fulfilling directions for all life forms and
resources.
Led by Assistant Professor Jennifer Brooke and Beatrix Farrand Visiting
Professor Robert Thayer, Professors Joe McBride and Matt Kondolf, and with the
cooperation of the Napa County Environmental Planning staff members,
students broke into six teams to investigate a number of critical dimensions of
the river valley: Water; Land and Vegetation; Energy and Transit; Housing,
Urban and Industry; Parks, Open Space and Tourism; and Agriculture, Food and
Wine. These analysis teams conducted exhaustive reconnaissance on the state of
the Napa River watershed with a view of likely conditions, potentials, and
limitations thirty years out, when transit fuels would be more scarce and
expensive, weather more extreme, population pressure more acute, and natural
habitat and open space more precious.
Analysis processes were immediately followed by a master planning phase
wherein student teams focused their efforts on components necessary to direct
the future of the region. One team hypothesized the creation of a quasi-public
initiative entitled “Common Roots”, a new twist on the contemporary CSA
(Community Supported Agriculture) movement, proposing a multifaceted urban
agricultural growing and distributing system with a neighborhood markets and
a centralized farmers market. With the goal of returning potentially productive
but underutilized lands to the provision of local food, their presentation included
a toolkit of strategies for small-scale, decentralized food production. Their work
also included the addition of an Urban Agriculture element to the City of Napa
zoning code, which would enable urban food production to be facilitated by local
government yet run by a local non-profit board of directors.
Another team branded itself as “THINC Transit”, an acronym standing for
“Transit Hybrid for an Integrated Napa Community”, and proposed a
sophisticated yet highly feasible public transit system utilizing existing Wine
Train rail rights-of-way and linking other potential transit corridors with existing
BART and Amtrak lines to provide ferry, train, light rail, bus, and shuttle transit
for the entire valley. Their final presentation included a highly detailed phasing
plan for implementing the transit system, complete with a hypothetical and
multi-modal schedule of arrivals and departures, including a by-reservation
shuttle for the remote valley towns of St. Helena and Calistoga.
In the final design phase, individual students chose site-specific design projects
that would build upon various goals and findings from the analysis and master
planning efforts completed earlier. These included a complex transit center
expansion on the site of the BayLink Ferry in Vallejo; an adaptive reuse plan to
turn a routine industrial park into a showcase venue for local organic food
production, distribution and waste management; a combined constructed
wastewater wetland/regional park and trail complex for Mare Island; a mixed
use affordable housing community built on the abandoned glider port in
Calistoga; upgraded recreational and habitat improvements to the estuarine
wetlands near the Napa airport; and dense transit-oriented development of land
along the proposed light rail line through the City of Napa.
Running successfully through the entire course was the theme of “Not Business
as Usual”. In envisioning the rather substantive changes anticipated with respect
to climate, rising sea levels, the peaking of oil, increases in population quantity
and social diversity, potential widening of income gaps, and the future need to
shorten the supply chain distance between sources and end uses of energy, food,
water, and materials, class members prepared themselves for a future where the
skills of landscape architects and environmental planners, as some of the most
logical systems thinkers, will be most sorely needed.
Studio instructors were Jennifer Brooke, Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture
and Environmental Planning; Robert Thayer, Beatrix Farrand Visiting Professor; Joe
McBride, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Forestry; and Mathias Kondolf,
Associate Professor of Environmental Planning and Geography. Participating students
were Patricia Algara, Jongkeun Choi, Noelle Cole, Astrid Diehl, Calder Gillin, Alethea
Harper, Joshua Kent, Freyja Knapp, Rusty Lamer, Erika Leachman, Miza Moreau,
Jennifer Natali, Shiva Niazi, Songha Park, Natalie Pollard, Zachary Rutz, Brooke Ray
Smith, Andreas Stavropoulos, Sutter Wehmeier, Alex Westhoff, Nicole Winn, Suzuko
Yamada, and Liyan Yang.