The Alameda Creek Atlas

Digital scavenger hunt.

Photo courtesy of N. Claire Napawan and Brett Snyder.

[T]here is an absence of human stories—those that show ordinary and relatable humans engaging with the issue of climate change.—Wang et al. 2018

Climate change is often conceptualized as an impending ecological disaster. However, vulnerability to its impacts are more accurately defined by social factors which present challenges to communities every day. Moreover, the predicted impacts that will exacerbate vulnerability are often difficult to comprehend or easily ignored given the global scale, extended time frames (Gilbert 2006), and predominantly negative imagery associated with climate change (Wang et al. 2018). Building resilience to these impacts will require engaging communities in defining indicators for vulnerability and codesigning opportunities for adaptation. It will also require communicating projected impacts to communities in a manner that encourages acceptance, dialogue, and action (Corner et al. 2015). As such, we need new tools for communicating climate impacts, defining vulnerability indicators, and engaging diverse publics in planning for future resilience. This requires collaboration between designers, decision makers, and community members and a robust conversation about the full socio-ecological dimensions of climate change through social science and humanistic methodologies. We believe that place-based participatory design and decision making can provide the opportunity for just that (Paschen and Ison 2014). The Alameda Creek Atlas demonstrates this possibility.

The Alameda Creek Atlas.

Photo courtesy of N. Claire Napawan and Brett Snyder.

Our selected site for inquiry is the lower Alameda Creek watershed, located in Alameda County in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area. This watershed is the largest in the region with the potential to transport much-needed sediment to the Bay and support the steelhead trout spawning upland¹; this would require dramatic changes in the creek’s physical design and management strategy to allow unimpeded up- and down-stream flows to effectively Unlock Alameda Creek. Included in the lower watershed are also some of the most diverse communities in the cities of Fremont, Union City, and Newark; they also represent some of the most vulnerable communities to the projected impacts of climate change, including communities of color, youth, and/or low socio-economic status (Cooley et al. 2012). Our process has been aided by the Rockefeller Institute-funded Resilient by Design Bay Area Challenge, a design competition that began in September 2017 and concluded in May 2018. As members of a selected team, Public Sediment, we have worked alongside our colleagues from Scape Studios, a landscape architecture firm in New York City; Dredge Research Collaborative, a consortium of sediment-focused environmental design academics; Arcadis, nationally based coastal engineers; TS Studio, a local urban design firm; and Buoyant Ecologies, an architectural/ecological design collaborative. Representing UC Davis faculty from the Departments of Design and Human Ecology, our focus is to integrate people in the design process and “unlock” the creek for culturally inclusive community access.

Outreach methodology.

Photo courtesy of N. Claire Napawan and Brett Snyder.
Click on image to open full-resolution PDF.

We utilized a range of formats for community outreach: public presentations, integrated community events, and community workshops. Our public presentations allowed us to coordinate with local agencies and disseminate our design process with regionally based organizations; integrated community events tapped into existing local programs and events; and community workshops provided greater collaboration with partners and focused time with participants. At each event, key concepts about the watershed were presented to the community by way of an Alameda Creek Appendix. In it, terms like watershed and sediment were defined and their relationships to community climate risks were described in English, Spanish, and Mandarin. Participants were then asked to provide their own interpretations of their community by way of the Alameda Creek Field Notes, sharing their connection to the landscape, stories of floods, and messages for stewardship. Additional tools, such as participatory mapping, story sharing, creative co-making, and social media scavenger hunts, diversified the opportunities for participants to engage with the Atlas materials. The results of this process form the Alameda Creek Atlas. It exposes a watershed that has been disconnected from the community that surrounds it, highly engineered, yet threatened by the very development its construction sought to encourage. It also reveals a diverse and vibrant community of people eager to engage in stewardship and advocate for resilience.

Participatory input.

Photo courtesy of N. Claire Napawan and Brett Snyder.
Click on image to open full-resolution PDF.

We see the Atlas as a community-building tool, highlighting existing community connections and encouraging new ones. These connections are the best strategy for community resilience to climate impacts (Department of Homeland Security 2013; Aldrich 2017). Current efforts at understanding social vulnerability to climate change within the region often do not include opportunities for the full public to inform the list of indicators selected², and they can quickly become outdated.³ We need adaptive models of information sharing, a better merger of social and ecological conceptualizations of climate changes, and, most importantly, to employ humanistic approaches to allow climate change to be known. We believe the Alameda Creek Atlas can provide such a model for place-based understanding of community change.

Alameda Creek crawl.

Photo by Ramon Estrada.

Creative Co-Making workshop.

Photo courtesy of N. Claire Napawan and Brett Snyder.

Participatory Mapping workshop.

Photo courtesy of N. Claire Napawan and Brett Snyder.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.