Berkeley’s Civic Center lies at the heart of the city and yet, despite its proximity to major commercial, academic, and cultural nodes, the space is dormant. Gehl led an inclusive and transparent community process to create a vision and plan to reinvigorate the space, and reclaim it as a true civic center.
The Future of Berkeley’s Civic Center
Reimagining the heart of Berkeley
Berkeley is home to a culture of academic curiosity, local commerce, and participatory public life, yet, the city’s civic center fails to reflect the surrounding wealth of community resources and offerings. The city worked with Gehl to develop a vision, multiple design concepts and an implementation plan for Berkeley’s Civic Center area, through a transparent public process rooted in analyses of local needs, technical factors, and social mapping.
The Civic Center Vision Plan is funded by a Measure T1 bond that dedicated $100 million worth of bonds to revamp the City’s aging infrastructure and facilities. The Vision includes conceptual design alternatives for the Veterans Memorial Building, Old City Hall, Civic Center Park, along with streets and adjacent
structures necessary for context-sensitive solutions. Gehl facilitated and drafted the community Vision Plan to determine how the allocated funds would be distributed and prioritize capital improvements.
A vision for and by the community
With the help of 21 volunteers over two days, Gehl’s Public Space Public Life (PSPL) study helped contextualize the social and physical conditions of the site and identified future opportunities for positive change.
The PSPL survey revealed that despite its geographic centrality, the Civic Center falls short on its potential to act as a center of public life and activity, especially when compared to other civic spaces and public squares. People aren’t choosing to stay or move through the space. Even during the popular Saturday Farmers’ Markets,
Facts
Vision
Location Berkeley, CA
Client City of Berkeley
Year 2019 - 2020 More here
Gehl Team Ghigo DiTommaso (Project Director), Rute Nieto Ferreira (Project Manager), Blaine Merker, Anna Muessig, Aja Jeanty,
A CommunityGuided Vision & Implementation Plan
The vision for the Future of Berkeley’s Civic Center reimagines Civic Center as a prime destination for civic life, culture, and the arts.
there’s not much spillover into the park.
In order to reach as many and as diverse a swath of the population as possible, the team held public meetings, conducted intercept surveys with passersby, mediated stakeholder conversations with key committees and municipal groups, and developed a public website to engage residents with online forums and surveys. During Covid-19, engagement had to transition to being digital-only. The team quickly pivoted and was able to capture an even larger audience with virtual public meetings and an interactive website that directly gathered community input.
The resulting bold, yet actionable, vision for the Future of Berkeley’s Civic Center offers three conceptual options for upgrades to the park and the surrounding streets. All three options unlock the area’s potential as a multigenerational space surrounded by a high density of public life. Each concept is anchored by seven “big moves” that focus on connective, frontages, programs and creating human-scaled spaces. The vision also includes programming recommendations for the Veterans Memorial Building, Old City Hall and the west site of 2180 Milvia. The vision options, case studies and a funding and financing strategy were presented to the community, commissions and City Council, and the Vision Plan was unanimously approved by Council in September 2020.
1. One of three conceptual design options presented to Berkeley’s City Council and the community
2. The team held several Public Meeting, including an Open House at Berkeley’s YMCA, and a workshop with local highschool students
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3. Digital engagement replaced in-person touch-points as Covid-19 Shelter-in-Place orders took place in 2020
