2022 Syllabus

MUD

Fall Semester 2022

env des 202 instructor: Ettore Santi, ettoresanti@berkeley.edu

University of California, Berkeley College of Environmental Design

DESIGNING THE

A RURAL CALIFORNIA STUDIO VALLEY

From Napa to San Joaquin, the concept and module of “the Valley” in California has emerged as a specific type of hinterland urbanism, in which localized land and food economies interact with planetary circuits of agriculture and tourism logistics. This Master of Urban Design Studio will expose students to the key design challenges posed by rural California and its ongoing transformations, including agro-touristization and territorial branding, water scarcity and ecological change, Indigenous politics, homelessness and immigrant labor. A sponsored trip to the Salinas Valley (also known as the “Salad Bowl of the World”) will be the starting point of the design exploration. During this immersive field experience, students will exchange with relevant actors (landowners, growers, governments, NGOs, workers, tourists, etc.), and define their own sites in relation to regional and transnational systems in place. They will later work to advance original and transformative proposals that collectively reimagine the future of the California Valley. Expanding the focus of urban design toward the rural environment, this studio will train students to address some of the key socioecological challenges they will likely face in the decades to come.

SALINAS VALLEY

Introduction

Welcome to the second stage of MUD! This semester, we will pick up from where you left in the summer studio, expand your knowledge of urban design thinking and practice, and redeploy it in a quite unusual context: the Salinas Valley. You will master one or more key issues emerging in this place that will inform your site construction, strategy, and design to produce a wide array of projects that reimagine the futures of rural California. As you will soon notice, this approach requires learning new techniques of representation, inquiry, analysis, and intervention, and even questioning what urban design is– or, what it needs to be in the coming decades. The studio will aim at simultaneously reimagining the site (Salinas Valley) and the field (Urban Design).

Urban Design goes Rural?

While urban design typically focuses on cities, recent socioeconomic and ecological changes globally have brought rural areas to the center of the public eye. In many rural places, access to land and food systems, resource extraction and distribution, ecologies of restoration, and ecotourism-led development are posing previously unexplored design challenges. In addition, in many places across the world, new forms of urbanization have made it impossible, or at least impractical, to trace distinctions among urban, suburban, and rural space. Instead, new frameworks have emerged to understand these spatial transformations: concepts like hinterland, territorialism, desa-kota (villagecity), bioregionalism, operational landscapes, and more, enable us to think beyond the hierarchical distinction of “urban center” and “rural periphery.” This studio will focus on questions like: what does it mean to design at the territorial scale? Can the life cycle of a crop affect the way we organize and experience space? Do endangered birds constitute a public, and can their space also accommodate, say, human tourists?

California’s Valley Urbanism: Specifically Global

These social and ecological transformations acquire specific forms in rural California. Unlike other rural areas across the world, which typically changed from feudal land systems to family farming or cash cropping, and, more recently, to intensive corporate agriculture, California agriculture largely skipped over subsistence. For millennia, California was inhabited by nomadic Native populations who did not rely on agriculture. The post-18th Century waves of colonial settlements, from the Spanish missionaries to the Mexican rancheros (the “Dons”), to the settlers moving from the East, imported commercial farming. Crops served as commodities to be sold for profit on the regional and national markets, making rural California a pioneer of modern agribusiness. In the 20th Century, California agriculture has yielded a large array of fruits and vegetables, all of which, once shipped via railroads, contributed to shaping the dietary habits of the entire country. Today, the encounter of industrial farming, logistics, agro-biotechnologies, tourism, and nature itself–with its unique climatic and geological conditions, generate a peculiar and productive “urban” condition that arguably bears no equals on the planet.

This commercial aspect of California agriculture is now changing. In addition to corporate agribusiness, the past few decades saw the emergence of the leisure industry. Places like the Napa Valley became known for their wine production, attracting tourists from every corner of the planet. Through campaigns of “territorial branding,” local governments and grower organizations discursively tied their regional environment to the high quality of their crops. This strategy aimed at attracting visitors interested in experiencing both the produce, the landscape and an imaginary of rural gentility. As California Valleys tried to diversify their brands (Napa and Sonoma went for Wine, San Joaquin is pushing walnut and tomato, Salinas is aiming at lettuce, etc.), their environment has changed to accommodate new activities, such as food tourism, nature exploration, and glam camping, all of which further blurs the relationship with adjacent categories of metropolitan and urban.

Worlding the Salad Bowl

The studio will take the Salinas Valley as a key site to investigate these dynamics. Shaped by the freshwater streams descending from the Gabilan Range and the Carmel and Big Sur hills into the Salinas River, the region is a hospitable and fertile canyon in central coastal California. Its richness in water and the mild climate made it first the home to the native Salinians tribes, and later to Spanish missionaries, Mexican landlords (or Californios), up to its formal annex to the US in 1847. Its proximity to the Monterey port, the first state capital and an early global trade node, made it one of the first agricultural regions in the American West to interlace with global supply chains. Over the decades, the Valley hosted many waves of immigrant labor, the most prominent of which followed the Bracero Program of the 1940s and 50s, that gradually shifted the valley demographics from white landowners to a largely Latinx farmworker population.

While Salinas agribusinesses have long exported their produce internationally, the “worlding” of the Valley may now expand to new sectors. The recent upgrade of Pinnacles National Park (previously classified only as a Monument), combined with the ongoing plans to create a National Heritage Area around the Monterey Bay Area, as well as local efforts for territorial branding, may soon connect the Valley to regional and global tourist flows. While these dynamics offer rich economic opportunities, they are also presenting tensions; the Salinas Valley is not immune from the problems affecting California at large, including housing crisis and homelessness, conflicts across racial and class lines, and even risks of epidemics and pathogen outbreaks (e.g. escherichia coli in lettuce).

In other words, whether or not these changes will happen, what forms they will take, and who will benefit from them, is yet to be determined. Our studio seeks to intervene in this state of transition, deploying design tools to catalyze forces already in place, test unexpected synergies, and advance new visions for the Salinas Valley and its inhabitants.

Some of the key elements of the Salinas Valley Urbanism include (but are not limited to):

Land-based economic drivers:

> landowners (often shareholding corporations)

> agribusiness companies

> local firms

> multinationals (e.g. Dole, Taylor Farms, Driscoll Berries, Tanimura and Antle...)

> energy production (both fossil and clean)

Knowledge-based economic drivers (often large industry):

> scientific farming and machine technology (including AI and big data)

> biotech industry

> seed and fertilizer distributors (e.g. Monsanto)

> universities and innovation hubs (e.g. Hatnell College Salinas, UC Santa Cruz, Forbes National Agritech Conference, Institute for Innovation and Economic Development at CSU Monterey)

Leisure-based economic drivers:

> wine industry, microbreweries, cider, spirits (e.g. Moonshine in Gonzales)

> reception industry (food and hospitality, not much developed so far)

> territorial Branding policies:

> National Heritage Area (Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito counties)

> “Salad Bowl of the World” brand (Salinas’ private sector)

Tourist adjacencies:

> Pinnacles National Park

> Monterey Peninsula, Carmel, Santa Cruz, Big Sur (with wildlife conservation areas)

> State parks: 13 in Santa Cruz district; 3 in San Benito County, how many in Monterey County

> Heritage presences (partially activated as tourist attractors):

> Indigenous sites and trails

> Franciscan missions (Carmel, San Juan Bautista, Soledad, etc.) the Anza Trail (now River Road)

> John Steinbeck sites (writer and Nobel Prize winner from Salinas)

Geological and biological changes:

> droughts in formerly water rich environment

> saline water intrusion in underground acquifers

> wildfires

> soil pollution

> reduction of biodiversity, (e.g. bees and monarch butterflies)

> bacteria outbreaks risk (esp. E. coli in lettuce)

> Rewilding and “regenerative agriculture” processes

Social tensions and inequalities:

> agrarian developers buying up familes’ farmlands (or shares of land equity)

> increasing housing cost, discrimination in access, increasing unhoused population

> shift from undocumented farm labor to H-2A immigrant labor (expanded from 350 in 2013 to 5,000)

> racial / social tensions (e.g. “the Lettuce Curtain,“ Peninsula vs inland valleys)

> ...

A site-immersive approach

This studio relies on an immersive field approach. Designing the countryside requires us to move beyond abstract analyses and get “down to earth,” jumping into the reality of actors, politics, and materials that co-produce the region. Besides our field trip, we will constantly exchange with local actors, guests, and experts that will offer their feedback throughout the development of your projects. We will also work to develop the specific expertise (agronomic, botanical, historical, archeological etc.) that you will need to master in order to carry on your proposals. This will increase the quality and reliability of your design outcome, as well as push the boundaries of what the urban design field can be. As part of this immersive approach, we will think of ourselves as real stakeholders in the Valley. Working with local organizations, you will assist and try to persuade local actors to make certain decisions. For doing so, your action tool will be design representation, which we will carefully investigate to test new visual languages, storytelling formats, and persuasion strategies.

Semester

> Course Structure

The studio is organized around seven reviews:

Representation - Week 4 Fieldwork - Week 5

Site Construction - Week 6 Territorial Strategy - Week 8

Design Interventions (the Pitch) - Week 11

Design Definition (Pre-final Review) - Week 15

Narrative (Final Review) - Week 17

1. REPRESENTATION / Week 4

How do we represent the rural? The countryside is often rendered quantitatively and abstractedly, either through GIS maps or via color-coded charts of soil quality, land ownership, farm productivity, etc. In this exercise, we will investigate different visual languages that capture the ever-shifting materiality of land and nature, the operational complexity of its multiscalar logistics, and the embodied experience of this environment. You will research a topic of your interest among the many historical, socio-cultural, economic, technological, and environmental questions posed by the Salinas Valley. You will then create one (1) powerful graphic that tells your own story of that topic. Use a multimedia approach, experimenting with collage, comic, film, rendering, and more. Keep in mind that this graphic should not only speak to an audience of design experts, but also to a broader public. Making your visual narrative compelling, engaging, complex yet widely understandable, will be the challenge of this exercise.

2. FIELDWORK / Week 5

After an initial exploration, it’s time to jump into the muddy reality of the field. During this trip to the Salinas Valley, you can either explore the topic selected for your previous exercise, or expand your interest to a new one. Make sure that you collect all visual and textual information that you will use in the further exercises, from the site construction to the design stages. After the trip, we will build a shared repository of all photos, maps, notes, etc. accessible to all students in the studio. You will also prepare a short presentation summarizing your key findings.

FIELDWORK DATES: September 15-19

slides + digital folder

HQ photos

videos

is fine)

.ppt

reports

reports

3. SITE CONSTRUCTION / Week 6

This exercise will lead you to define the main argument about your site, a claim that will guide you along your design definition. After gathering knowledge about the Salinas Valley, what are the intellectual, geographical, historical boundaries of your design inquiry? What are the socioecological processes at play, and where do they span across time and space? What is your original site thesis in relation to this inquiry, and what design directions and potentials is this argument pointing toward? Identify and map the actors and networks involved, and the space in which they operate. These might include private or government institutions, local organizations, seed types, plants, animals, soil conditions, (bio)technologies, circuits of knowledge, and more. Ask yourself: who and what exercises agency in the countryside? Summarize key findings of your research and synthetize them in a clear, argumentative graphic. Provide a compelling title for your site construction, as well. Previous conversations on fieldwork and representation should be incorporated and expanded in this exercise.

Deliverables: 1 A0 board

> site construction board

4. TERRITORIAL STRATEGY / Week 8

At the scale of the rural, everything is stretched. Urban design strategies need to be crafted at the territorial scale. Territory is a governed space, upon which different agencies, institutions, human and more-than-human forms of power operate. In this exercise, define your territorial strategy as informed by your research and site construction thesis. In order to be a territory, a space does not need to be unitary or consolidated. Appropriate territorial strategies could be decribed as rambling, multi-pointed, dispersed, scattered, wide-spread, uneven, heterogeneous, etc.

Based on this strategy, what tools do you need in order to consolidate your design? Think of:

(1) canonical urban design tools: architectural: programs / buildings / forms landscape: systems / ecologies / flows policies: guidelines / organizations / norms

(2) other design tools, such as: geo / biological long section (territorial) studies agronomic / horticultural / botanical biochemical archeological hydrological

(3) non-typical design tools, such as: culinary mediatic/communicational Indigenous systems of knowledge literary histories other?

Master the knowledge and tools that your strategy demands. Your strategy can take many diagrammatic forms, e.g. a game board, a constellation, a machine, and more. Consider the type of representational products you aim to create as much as the point of view you want it to convey.

Deliverables: slides + 1 A0 board

> framework plan

> slides displaying your analytical process in relation to the site strategy

> 1 comprehensive diagram showing your agencies / networks / tools (printed, A0)

5. DESIGN INTERVENTIONS - The Pitch / Week 11

Given this stretched condition that we just explored, be ready to propose a large array of interventions which aknowlege the Valley scale; each group should advance as many designs as their territorial strategy demands. These interventions are as individual as they are interdependent. Show all of them this week.

No need to be precise here. You should produce one or two key images for each design that clearly communcate the concept of your designs. Plug-in everything into a single framework plan: see what it does.

Important: this week you will be visited by NGO and government officials from Salinas. Prepare a persuasive *pitch* to narrate your territorialk strategy and the complex of design intervetions you have imagined to implement it.

Deliverables: slides

> updated and detailed framework plan

> volumetric axonometries of each desing interventions

> key sections

> as many diagrams as required by your strategy and designs

→

Perspective: Eco-Pool

→

Perspective: Aquaponics Field

→

Perspective: Birdpost Wetland

6. DESIGN DEFINITIONS – Prefinal Review / Week 15

Finalize your designs. This exercise requires you to develop two parts: (1) detailing all of the aspects elaborated in your strategy (1-5). In this part, you will need to dig deep into how to operationalize the key elements of your design, and show convincing graphics explaining their functioning; (2) define their architectural quality of your selected design interventions. Defined designs should communicate the embodied qualities of our design, including materialities, spatial perceptions, human and more-than-human visions, changes across seasons, etc. You can use plans, sections, axonometries, collages, renderings, films, physical models, and more. This is the final design stage: everything needed in order to fully describe your project should be on the boards.

As you define your projects, think about drafting the following:

(1) building shapes and locations;

(2) osmosis between buildings and landscapes, open spaces, gradients of publicity;

(3) patterns of mobilities, accesses, and connections;

(4) ownership structures, spatial/financial models, and (re)distributive flows;

(5) socionatural exchanges and ecologies;

(6) catalytic futures and possibilities beyond your designs;

(7) any specific feature as demanded by each interventions.

Deliverables: A0 boards

> detailed plan

> detailed sections and axonometries

> diagrams and schemes explaining key ideas and design aspects

> zooms: renderings/visualizations, axos, sections, etc.

7. NARRATIVE – Final Review / Week 17

Pens down: we go back to representation. Give some holistic thinking to your project, and inscribe it into an overarching persuasive narrative that will engage your audience. This exercise should incorporate all deliverables you produced across the semester, including research, site construction, design graphics, and future possibilities. We aim to achieve a professional-level graphic that unifies all your thinking into a cohesive, exceptionally rendered story. Don’t be afraid to be experimental and multimedial here. Instead, think broadly: what kinds of creative maps, renderings, collages, videos, VR tools, conceptual/interactive physical models, or else, do you need to convey your message? And what shall their visual language be? Work with complexities and contradictions, juxtaposing the logical with the surprising, the predetermined with the defamiliarized, the rational with the poetic, etc.

You may apply further changes and developments to your design, but these should be functional to your general storytelling effort. Remember that representation is an act of design in itself, in which you need to think deeply about who you are speaking to, how you intend to captivate them, and what aesthetic/communicational registers you need to develop in order to succeed.

Deliverables: A0 boards + …

> site construction (revisited)

> site strategy (revisited)

> detailed plan

> detailed sections and axonometries

> diagrams explaining greater details (collages, comics, storyboards…)

> multimedia tools (films, VR, AR, physical models…)

> zooms: renderings/visualizations, plans, sections, etc. (1 per person)

Class Schedule

Tentative Schedule

Week 1: Wed. August 24 - Course Introduction

Week 2: Mon. August 29 - Desk Crits: Research and Representation Wed. August 31 - Group Review: Research and Representation

Week 3: Mon. September 5 (No class, Academic Holiday)

Wed. September 7 - Group Review: Research and Representation

Week 4: Mon. September 12 - Desk Crits: Research and Representation Wed. September 14 -Step 1 review: REPRESENTATION - (due at 2pm on bCourses)

FILEDWORK: Thursday, September 15th - Monday, September 19th

Week 5: Wed. September 21 - Step 2 review: FIELDWORK - (due at 2pm on bCourses)

Week 6: Mon. September 26 - Desk Crits: Site Construction Wed. September 28 - Step 3 review: SITE CONSTRUCTION - (due at 2pm on bCourses)

Week 7: Mon. October 3 - Desk Crits: Site Strategy Wed. October 5 - Group Discussion: Site Strategy

Week 8: Mon. October 10 - Desk Crits: Site Strategy Wed. October 12 - Step 4 review: TERRITORIAL STRATEGY - (due at 2pm on bCourses)

Week 9: Mon. October 17 - Desk Crits: Spatial Strategy Wed. October 19 - Group Discussion: Spatial Strategy

Week 10: Mon. October 24 - Desk Crits: Spatial Strategy Wed. October 26 - Group Discussion: Spatial Strategy

Week 11: Mon. October 31 - Desk Crits: Design Definition Wed. November 2 - Step 5 review: DESIGN INTERVENTIONS - The Pitch - (due at 2pm on bCourses)

Week 12: Mon. November 7 - Desk Crits: Design Definition Wed. November 9 - Desk Crits: Design Definition

Week 13: Mon. November 14 - Desk Crits: Design Definition Wed. November 16 - Group Review: Design Definition

Week 14 Mon. November 21 - Desk Crits: Design Definition Wed. November 23 (No class, Academic Holiday)

Week 15 Mon. November 28 - Desk Crits: Design Definition Wed. November 30 - Prefinal Review: DESIGN DEFINITION - Prefinal Review- (due at 2pm on bCourses)

Week 16 December 5-9: RRR week (No class, students work independently)

Week 17 December 12-16: Final Review NARRATIVE - Final Review (Exact day TBD)

Studio Expectations

GRADE EVALUATION

Each student’s final grade will be determined by the student’s progress in class and final products from each exercise. This includes the quality of interaction, production, craft, content, and presentation of the student’s work. Students are expected to have completed new work for every class meeting.

Students are expected to engage in active discussions regarding the progress of their work. All assignments will be due at the beginning of class on designated dates. Please account for unforeseen delays in printing, saving, etc. when budgeting time before desk critiques and pin-ups.

Late work is not accepted (unless approved in advance) and will be awarded 0 points. Letter grades can be interpreted as follows:

A: Superior performance demonstrating complete and thorough understanding of the course material. Creative output is produced with intention, clarity, logic, and originality. (100-90%)

B: Good performance with an understanding of the course material, yet creative output lacks the thoroughness and completion of an “A” project. The approach may be creative, but the outcome is not totally justified and requires minor changes. Project is presented clearly and logically, however, it is not completely convincing. (89-80%)

C: At the overall level necessary for a graduate degree. Meets minimum requirements. Indicates some difficulty in understanding the concepts. Exhibits need for improvement in work habits and critical thinking skills. Insufficient participation. (79-70%)

D: Below average work. Does not meet minimum requirements. Indicates serious difficulty in understanding concepts. Probable indication of a lack of commitment to the course. (69-60%)

F: Unsatisfactory performance. Substantial failure to submit completed assignments on time. This grade cannot be used to fulfill a graduate program requirement. (59% and below)

PARTICIPATION / ATTENDANCE

Participation is an imperative part of this studio course. Not only does it contribute substantially to your final grade, but more importantly, it is crucial in your ability to effectively complete assignments.

Participation is defined as demonstrated preparation and active engagement in class discussions and lab session; preparation for and participation in pin-ups, presentations, desk critiques, and site visits. You are expected to arrive on time for each course meeting.

Attendance of all classes is required. If you cannot attend class, please notify me as soon as possible. 3 unexcused absences will result in the lowering of your final grade by one letter grade. Each subsequent absence will result in the drop of an additional letter grade. 5 unexcused absences will result in the automatic failure of the course.

GRADE BREAKDOWN

Reviews 1-5: 50% (10% x 5)

Reviews 6-7: 30% (15% x 2)

Particiaption: 10%

Attendance: 10%

ACADEMIC INTEGRITY

The following text regarding UC Berkeley’s academic integrity expectations is taken directly from the published Berkeley Honor Code. The full document can be found at: https://asuc.org/honorcode/resources.php. It is the responsibility of each student to be familiar, understand, and implement these policies. Please don’t hesitate to reach out to me, your academic advisor, or a member of the Division of Student Affairs if any policy is unclear. The student community at UC Berkeley has adopted the following Honor Code: “As a member of the UC Berkeley community, I act with honesty, integrity, and respect for others.” The hope and expectation is that you will adhere to this code.

Collaboration and Independence: Reviewing lecture and reading materials and studying for exams can be enjoyable and enriching things to do with fellow students. This is recommended. However, unless otherwise instructed, assignments are to be completed independently and materials should be the result of one’s own independent work.

Plagiarism: To copy text or ideas from another source without appropriate reference is plagiarism and will result in a failing grade for your assignment and usually further disciplinary action. For additional information on plagiarism and how to avoid it, see the following: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/instruct/guides/citations.html#Plagiarism http://gsi.berkeley.edu/teachingguide/misconduct/prevent-plag.html

Academic Integrity and Ethics: Cheating on exams and plagiarism are two common examples of dishonest, unethical behavior. Honesty and integrity are of great importance in all facets of life. They help to build a sense of self-confidence, and are key to building trust within relationships, whether personal or professional. There is no tolerance for dishonesty in the academic world, for it undermines what we are dedicated to doing—furthering knowledge for the benefit of humanity.

Your experience as a student at UC Berkeley is hopefully fueled by passion for learning and replete with fulfilling activities. An d we also appreciate that being a student can be stressful. There may be times when there is temptation to engage in some kind of cheating in order to improve a grade or otherwise advance your career. This could be as blatant as having someone else sit for you in an exam, or submitting a written assignment that has been copied from another source. And it could be as subtle as glancing at a fellow student’s exam when you are unsure of an answer to a question and are looking for some confirmation. One might do any of these things and potentially not get caught. However, if you cheat, no matter how much you may have learned in this class, you have failed to learn perhaps the most important lesson of all.

DIGITAL BACK UP

Because of the volatility of digital media, it is important that you keep a backup of your work in a safe place at all times. It is recommended that you keep a copy on your local hard drive as well as a backup on an external hard drive and/or flash drive. Dropbox (or, Box) can also be utilized to store digital copies of files on both your hard drive and a cloud server. Never use a flash drive as the only place to store your data; a flash drive is a device to transfer information from one hard drive to another and should be used accordingly. Unfortunately, losing your information because of a computer failure is not a valid excuse for being unprepared to meet studio expectations.

DISABLED STUDENTS’ PROGRAM [DSP]

The Disabled Students’ Program’s mission is to ensure that all students with disabilities have equal access to educational opportunities at UC Berkeley. They offer a wide range of services, accommodations, and auxiliary services for students with disabilities. They design these services individually, based on the specific needs of each student and individual requirements as identified by DSP’s specialists. It is the responsibility of the student to apply for services directly with the DSP and to provide documentation of conditions that may warrant academic accommodation. If you feel that you may qualify, please make an appointment with a Disability specialist in order to proceed. Find more information regarding DSP at: http://dsp.berkeley.edu/ resources.