Daylit Sausal Creek Socio-Ecological Infrastructure – Merit Award

PERSPECTIVE SECTION PPI
Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood lacks quality public space and faces a looming environmental threat: rising sea levels are pushing groundwater upward, threatening to rupture the buried culvert containing Sausal Creek. This project tackles both issues by daylighting the creek, reclaiming and transforming a critical underground pipe into a visible, socio-ecological asset for the community. The design extends the existing Carmen Flores Recreation Center across José de la Cruz Park under a sweeping, solar-integrated canopy. The landscape is designed to shift radically between seasons. In dry months, it acts as an active civic hub offering shaded performance plazas, terraced play areas, and a soccer field, all running on community-generated solar power. When the wet season arrives, the ground plane becomes a working sponge. These same public spaces flood by design, acting as a bioretention system that filters runoff, prevents erosion, and restores native biodiversity. To combat summer heat, a closed-loop greywater system powers overhead sprinklers and feeds tiered planters, creating a localized microclimate against the urban heat island. Climate infrastructure doesn’t have to be invisible. By unearthing Sausal Creek, this design secures long-term resilience for a vulnerable community, putting climate adaptation at the heart of the neighborhood rather than burying it underground.
//jury notes

The jury admires how the designers used very strategic interventions to improve the usability of small urban open spaces that are critical to communities. The design is eloquently intentional, specific to and forming from all of the sustainability and resiliency goals, and it addresses human comfort and the importance of shade in an interesting and compelling way. They did a great job at listening to the site and existing buildings, expressing innovative ideas on integrating community, equity and sustainability with long term resiliency.

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