Reimagining the metropolis
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Video by Sylvia Wright, UC Davis
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Not so long ago, a traveler driving the interstate from Sacramento to the Sierra would pass through 20 minutes of urb and sub-urb followed by 70 minutes of no urb at all. Now the proportions seem nearly reversed.
It’s a pattern being repeated across the nation, from Seattle-Tacoma to Providence-Pawtucket-Woonsocket and Tampa-St. Pete-Orlando. Stephen Wheeler, UC Davis associate professor of landscape architecture, calls the enormous transformation from unbuilt to built landscape “the biggest trend in American land use — the frontier.”
This summer, Wheeler leads a team of undergraduates and graduate students in a research project to document and analyze this trend in progress in metropolitan Sacramento, which lies just 10 miles from the UC Davis campus.
Making more informed choices
When done, Wheeler says, “We will have helped people understand the environment that society has built for itself in the past century — and make more informed choices about the environment we are going to build for ourselves in the next century.”
In the process, a handful of young people will learn the art, science and politics of urban development.
’These students are the designers of the neighborhoods of the future. Hopefully they will shape better places for us all to live.’
Stephen Wheeler, UC Davis associate professor of landscape architecture
“These students are the designers of the neighborhoods of the future,” said Wheeler. “They will be hired by consulting firms, cities, counties, state and regional government.
“Some will work for private developers and will actually design the developments. Some will work for public entities that regulate development. Hopefully they will shape better places for us all to live.”
Recently, they gathered at 8 a.m. under burly old trees in a busy 100-year-old downtown Sacramento neighborhood, just a few blocks from the neoclassical 1874 Capitol building.
Putting neighborhood characters on maps
The team was making a daylong reconnaissance trip to put neighborhood characters on maps they had built from historical archives, government records and Google Earth.
In the next several hours, Wheeler said, they would traverse time and space from this point through the city’s “streetcar suburbs,” urban sprawl and rural sprawl to the region’s outermost growth ring, the rural fringe, including walking surveys of an urban 1970s-era apartment complex and a New Urbanist community under construction.
They were:
- Craig Beebe, a geography graduate student;
- Barbara Nazarewicz, an undergraduate student majoring in landscape architecture; and
- Linda Antonini, an architect from Italy hoping to enter the Landscape Architecture Program as a doctoral student.
In typical UC Davis “no boundaries” style, Mary Cadenasso, a UC Davis faculty member from the Department of Plant Sciences and one of her students accompanied the Wheeler team.
Cadenasso is testing a new land cover classification system that focuses on plants, buildings and surface materials to determine how they influence ecological processes in urban landscapes. Ecology graduate student James McConaghie is investigating how land cover and residential water use in neighborhoods affect the timing, amount and quality of stream flows.
Surveying the block
Wheeler gave the team its marching orders. “We’ll take a brief walk through each of these [neighborhoods], just several blocks, just to get a sense. Is this a fairly typical example of this neighborhood? What is here ’on the ground’?
On the home page: UC Davis researchers examine “Medical City” from the foot of the UC Davis Medical Center main hospital building. From left: Assistant Professor Mary Cadenasso, graduate student Craig Beebe and Associate Professor Stephen Wheeler. (Sylvia Wright/UC Davis photo)
“I’d like you to take notes on the housing forms and building forms, including rough sizes, number of units, types of businesses we see, rough estimates on types of blocks,” he said.
“What is the lotting on each block? What is the dimension of each block? And what is the tree canopy, types of species? Do we see any remnant ecosystem elements, any hydrological elements?
“So just keep your eyes open. Anything interesting, make notes of.” And they were off.