CHALLENGE

Extreme weather events and gradual sea level rise have always created challenges for coastal design. The new challenge comes from evidence that the rate of sea level rise is increasing, along with the likelihood of extreme rainfall and winds. It is becoming clearer that coastal development must change in order to accommodate new beaches, marshes and sub-tidal grasslands that will be needed when habitats that exist today are submerged. This global conflict must be ad-dressed, if we expect to have fish and shellfish to eat 50-75 years from now. The other side of the problem is that human cultures are often slow to prepare for unprecedented changes, finding them difficult to imagine.

Design can lead the way to new ideas about what it means to be human in our time, when we are confronted by an unusually urgent need to adapt beyond the capabilities of our current infrastructure. Coastal adaptation can be “cul-ture-led,” not just engineered to do the least harm. If designers combine functional goals with unusual aesthetic experi-ences, coastal designs can inspire us all to act with courage and resourcefulness.

The San Francisco Bay is a rich estuary environment, partially filled in the last 100 years for urban development and, as a result, is likely to face significant challenges from sea level rise. The Bay’s waterfront facilities were primarily built in the WWII era and the three decades of expansion that followed. Landfills became parks, marinas were constructed for boat owners, private industrial or ferry piers were abandoned and public fishing piers replaced them. The wetland fringes of the Bay were mostly lost in urban areas, interrupting corridors that are critical to juvenile fish and shellfish populations in the Bay.

The challenge of this event is to propose new shoreline types and structures that will create new opportunities to expe-rience this urban waterside environment, and to perceive, understand and adapt to environmental change. The client is the Bay Area Conservation and Development Commission, which is actively seeking new prototypical proposals that could be applied around the Bay, from San Francisco to San Jose to San Pablo Bay.

The site is the historic Berkeley pier and adjacent areas on either side, including the Bay edges of Shorebird Park and Cesar Chavez Park. Thisstretch of shoreline includes a public pier structure, a small sandy beach park with picnic facilities, and a significant amount of parking for two small restaurants that could be relocated or reduced. The pier is a popular public fishing spot, and the adjacent area is actively used for kite flying, bicycling, dog walking, other recreational activi-ties, and major public festivals. Chavez Park is the site of a former municipal landfill, now surrounded by rock riprap that protects it from winter tides and wave action. This entirely artificial landscape offers considerable freedom to propose new schemes, and increase the length of Bay edge that includes multiple zones of plants and wildlife.

Host:

University of California BerkeleyDepartment of Landscape Architecture and Environmental PlanningKristina Hill, PhD (Faculty Host)

Co-Hosts:

Bill Main, Honorary ASLA, CEO and President of the Board of Directors, Landscape FormsRichard Heriford, President, Landscape FormsBarbara Deutsch, Executive Director, Landscape Architecture Foundation

.. ....MORESPECIFICALLY

We are asking you to do the following five things at the Berkeley Pier, as an example for the region:

1. Reveal the ecosystem dynamics of the San Francisco Bay shoreline, including (but not limited to):

a. changing elevations of Bay waters with the tides (daily, seasonal) b. changes produced by increasing sea level driving higher tides c. change produced by sediment deposition (prompted by the interaction of currents from the north with structures, and/or placed by dredge boats) d. changes produced by increasing/decreasing salinity of Bay waters, which vary seasonally and closer/ farther from shore.

e. changes produced by artificial materials as substrates for plant and animal habitat f. changes produced by natural and artificial lighting g. impacts of wave action (summer westerly winds) h. potential adjustments in location or other growth patterns of species (plants and animals) to these dynamics, in the artificial shoreline structures and substrates common to the filled shoreline of Berkeley.

2. Increase the variety of pathways/floating walkways/pier-like structures that may express a range of conditions, and assist in meeting goal (1) above:

a. wheelchair accessible (some) b. physically-challenging for people with unimpaired mobility (some):

i. slippery, narrow or disconnected surfaces, like stepping stones or narrow rope or wooden walkways ii. grates inundated at low tide. iii. overlooks or lookout structures (made with fill or towers)

3. Promote access for managed fishing and foraging during both day and night along the shoreline (shellfish, herring, monkey-face eel, seaweeds, etc.)

4. Reveal the history of the Berkeley Pier as an artificial landform/pier structure that plays host to multiple important community events (Fourth of July). Consider the possibility of relocating/re-sizing the three restaurants that currently lease land at the Berkeley Pier, as well as parking for those restaurants. Increase small boat and bicycle access to areas around the Pier.

5. Increase the amount of intertidal and subtidal habitat on and around today’s Berkeley waterfront, specifically around the pier (parking lots, Shorebird Park, Cesar Chavez Park, the Brickyard). The designs should contain a net increase in tidal habitat vs. present conditions.

theberkeleypier

The Berkeley Pier, with its associated boat marina and parks. Windsurfers and kayakers launch from the south side. The famous “Adventure Playground” (built in 1979, and one of only two left in the United States) is located next to Shorebird Park. The filled land ends east of I-80, where the original shoreline was once a popular sandy beach (now covered with fill).

In the late 19th century, a wharf and pier were built for a soap company located on the west edge of Berkeley, A num-ber of small piers coalesced into one long municipal pier in 1909. A small steam train served the wharf, running out on the pier and bringing goods in from boats. Later, a streetcar extended out onto the full 3.5 miles of the pier. A car ferry was built in the 1920’s, allowing cars to drive the length of the pier onto a ferry boat to San Francisco. The land around the pier was filled between 1900 and the 1950’s, when the group “Save the Bay” was formed to prevent future filling. The large rectangular blocks of fill were municipal landfills, filled with garbage. The small, irregularly-shaped fill along the highway to the south is known as the Dirt Pile, and is a location where contractors and the city of Berkeley store dirt between construction projects. The city plans to flatten it and made into a park, and the dirt relocated to the a city to the north (Albany or Richmond).

Today the Pier is a very popular fishing spot, day and night. A major fireworks event occurs at the beginning of the dock near the Marina, which people come to see from miles away (often sitting atop the Dirt Pile for the best view). Windsurf-ing and sailing events happen around the Pier, along with a kite festival at Cesar Chavez Park. Families picnic at Shorebird Park and its small beach. Native oyster beds exist both south and north of the pier area. Strwberry Creek discharges to the immediate south, between University Ave. and the Dirt Pile.

background

1.0 T I D E S S H A P E S P A C E

The San Francisco Bay is subject to two tidal cycles every day: one high tide occurs when the moon is directly overhead, and the second when it is on the exact opposite side of the earth. This produces a “high tide” and a “HIGHER high tide,” and a low tide and a LOWER low tide, every day. These maxima and minima are also known as MHHW (Mean Higher High Water), Mean High Water (MHW), Mean Low Water (MLW), and Mean Lower Low Water (MLLW).

Figure 1. Tides during the first week of April, 2013.

Figure 1. Example tide chart for the week of the XtremeLA charrette in Berkeley.

There is a difference of 6 to 9 feet between MLLW and MHHW. The tides are typically greater in winter, when the so-called “king tides” may flood low-lying areas. A rising tide is called a flood tide, and a falling tide is called an ebb tide. Slack water occurs in between these phases. Exceptionally high tides known as “spring tides” occur during both full andnew moons, and low tides (“neap tides”) occur during half and quarter moons. When the sun is closest to the earth in winter (for the Bay area), the largest tides of the year occur. They are known as “king tides.”

Figure 2. King tide levels in Berkeley, January 2013.

Unique spaces are created by the constant cyclical rise and fall of the brackish water. These habitat zones / energy zones create greater diversity, provide more ecosystem services, and are more resilient when they occur together in a stair-like form, from lowest (sub-tidal) to highest (supra-tidal). The type of geological material that forms the bottom layer varies around the Bay-- sometimes a rocky a headland, sometimes a sandy beach, but most often the shoreline was mud and silt. Now almost all of the bay shoreline is a chunky artificial rip-rap, placed to protect banks from erosion.

As rip-rap and fill replaced the sandy beaches and mudflats, the amount of intertidal habitat shrank from extensive landscapes to tiny ribbons with no room for salt marsh. Re-shaping the Bay edge can bring the marshes back, or cause them to disappear forever.

2.0 W I N D M O V E S S T U F F 2.1

Wind in the San Francisco Bay area can be a significant force in daily life. In the winter, wind often comes from the south. In the summer, wind comes from the north in the morning but by afternoon, strong and steady winds blow from west to east across the Bay. In spring and fall, so-called “Diablo winds” can blow from the northeast bringing hot, very dry air and gusts of 40 mph or more. These winds correspond with Berkeley’s fire season in the fall.

Most wave action is generated by summer afternoon winds from the west.

Wind rose from the Oakland Airport, showing annual distributions of winds (speed shown as color, frequency shown by length of bar).

Sea levels in the Bay can also be affected by El Nino climatic events, in which winds along the equator slacken. In 1998, an El Nino event resulted in 2-foot higher sea levels -- essentially because tehre was an unusual lack of wind thousands of miles away.

The San Francisco area has also experienced extreme rainfall events, known as the “Atmospherc River” phenomenon. One of these storms occurred in the mid-19th century, flooding much of the San Joaquin Valley. A catastrophic rainfall like that could burst the levees that now line the San Joaquin Delta, and produce a huge freshwater flow to San Pablo Bay in the north of the San Francisco Bay. Small creeks in Berkeley could also flood, including Strawberry Creek next to the Berkeley Pier.

2.0 C U R R E N T S M O V E S T U F F

Currents in the SF Bay are different in the three zones of the Bay. Berkeley Pier is in the Central Bay. In an ebb tide, the waters around the Berkeley Pier are directly influenced by currents from the north that are turning away from the coast and speeding down towards deeper water at the Golden Gate. In a flood tide, saline ocean water flows toward the Berkeley Pier from the Golden Gate, splitting into a northern flow and a southern flow about 4000 feet from the shoreline.

Incoming tides can be fastest at the Golden Gate, slowing as they hit the shallows off of Berkeley and Richmond and turning south as they meet the waterflowing out of rivers in the San Joaquin Delta to the north-east. Berkeley Pier is marked with the whitearrow. Sediments accumulate on the north side of the Berkeley Pier, where the water is now slightly shallower as a result. Most of the Bay bottom near thePier is muddy, not sandy. Artifical rip-rap creates avery common rocky edge as well.

Outgoing tides flush the water of the Central Bay, drawing it down into ancient river channels nowsubmerged as part of the Bay’s “bathymetry,” or under-water topography. Water quality is relatively good in the Central Bay, and relatively saline - more like theocean waters that come in with the tide than thewaters of the South or North Bay. The Bay’s average depth is about 18 feet.

Littoral cells carry the drifting larvae of shellfish, along with phytoplankton, zooplankton, plant seeds, and other organ-isms. Oyster beds develop when oyster larvae (also known as spats) drop out of the water column onto clean oyster shells. Biologists working in the Bay think that can happen in any shallow waters of the Bay. Artificial reefs of shells have been put in black net bags and staked to weighted pallets on the bottom of the Bay to promote oyster growth, including in the areas around Berkeley Pier. Some plants also grow easily from seeds, and others are not as good at “recruitment,” as ecologists call this process, and must be planted or spread locally by growth in their rhizomes.

3.0 B I O D I V E R S I T Y O N T H E E D G E

The rocky shoreline habitat and organisms of the Bay. Both artificial and natural surfaces are colonized by mollusks and seaweeds.

Gelatinous mud is a common substrate in much of the Bay’s shallow water. Eelgrass - a key species that provides a kind of subtidal “rainforest” in the Bay - needs a medium-grained sand to thrive, as well as access to light. In the past, mining in the Sierras added so much sediment to the Bay that it was hard for plants to survive in deeper waters. Now that sediment has settled, and the Bay may develop more plants in the water column fueled by nitrogen - which is over-abun-dant - instead of being limited by a lack of light.

Illustrations by Mariel Steiner..

From Callaway et al, 2011

Plants from the sub-tidal, inter-tidal and supra-tidal zones of San Francisco Bay. The Bay is also one of the most invaded systems in the US. Spartina alterniflora, a more vigorous saltmarsh cordgrass that holds sediment and grows the height of a marsh, was brought from the East Coast for erosion control in the 1970’s and spread aggressively, but has been almost eradicated (about 95%). In salt marsh restorations, pickleweed is one of the first plants to come in. Unusual species such as the Clapper Rail (a marsh-nesting bird) sometimes find cover in inva-sive species as well as natives. The local food movement has given rise to cooks who try to use Bay seaweed such as “Turkish bathtowel” in their dishes.

Rocky shores and soft-sediment wetlands exist side-by-side in the Bay, where headlands give way to river mouths. Sandy beaches were once more numerous; in fact, a large one that was very popular for recreation was buried under fill along Berkeley’s waterfront sometime between the 1920’s and the 1960’s.

Eelgrass beds can be exposed at low tide, providing an important foraging ground for birds. Photo by Kerry Wilcox.

Oyster shells were placed just north of the Berkeley Pier by a crane on a barge, as a substrate to attract new oysters. Photo by Gwen-dolyn Meyer.

Animal life in and around the Bay exists in a web of “trophic relationships,” or food webs. An increase in the population size of a predator may quickly decrease the population size of its prey. The decline of a predator can lead to explosive population growth in its prey species. Changes in the Bay favor some species over others, and new exotic species seem to arrive every deacde or more frequently, courtesy of the discharged ballast water of large ships.

Humans are a major influence, as we introduce sport fish (striped bass) and change our taste for seafood - the monkey-face eel (which is not actually an eel at all) has begun to appear on “local food” menus in the Bay Area as a local delicacy, with local foragers providing the fish.

Food web images by Mariel Steiner.

4.0 C L I M A T E C H A N G E

Sea levels are expected to rise faster over the coming century than they have in the past. San Francisco Bay has seen both high sea levels and very low sea levels in the past. At one point, the Bay was a dry basin with two large rivers running through it, one from the north and one from the south, and many small tributaries coing from the east. These channels were inundated as sea levels rose after the glaciers receded.

Today, the Bay Area Conservation and Development Commission (BCDC) uses 4.5 - 5.5 feet of sea level rise by 2100 as a planning number. But the rate is expected to increase exponentially, so if the curve of that increase in rate is steep, we could see much more dramatic changes after 2100 - perhaps as much as a doubling in the level of the sea within only 10 years after 2100, bringing it to 9 - 11 feet.

BCDC’s map of 55 inches (4.5 ft) of sea level rise in the Central Bay.

The main problems are that much of the region’s transportation infrastructure (railways and airports as well as highways) are along the shoreline, and vunerable to inundation. In addition, much new bousing is being built near the shore - par-ticularly on Treasure Island and in Marina Bay in SF, as well as a new research campus for Berkeley. As sea levels and king tides rise and cause more frequent inundation, buildings, roadways, and rail lines will all need protection by levees, or by lifting, or they will need to be abandoned. The construction of a single massive barrier at the Golden Gate is possible, but that would turn the Bay into a freshwater lake. It would also prevent Oakland and Alameda from having one of the West Coast’s busiest ports.

From “Costs and benefits of using tidal marshes as a sea level rise adaptation strategy,” Bay Institute, 2013

If no single barrier is built, communities along the Bay will have to adapt piecemeal. BCDC is already working with com-munities to identify adaptation strategies, but none have been built to date. Examples are needed of how shorelines can be adapted in ways that are beautiful and/or sublime, rich in habitat, safe, cost-effective, and sustainable from both a cost and maintenance perspective.

The Bay Institute released a report in February of 2013 calling for wetlands to be added to traditional levees as an adap-tation approach that is both rich in habitat and cost-effective. They call this the “horizontal levee” concept, because the width of the seaward wetland increases the capacity of the levee at the same time it provides other ecosystem services.

Levees are already a major part of the South Bay, which has a long history of salt evaporation as an industry. Those salt ponds have been partially restored as wetlands, giving ecologists confidence that new wetlands can be put in place all around the Bay. The key questions are whether there will be enough sediment to raise the level of the Bay high enough along the shoreline to support wetland plants as sea levels rise; whether subtidal wetlands will be able to climb to high-er substrates as well; and whether there will be linkages to streams that provide improtant freshwater inputs to near-shore ecosystems (crabs and other animals often navigate to find the shore by the “smell” of freshwater, where they find plant detritus and terrestrial insects to eat).

It’s also important to question whether traditional levees are a good idea, given the way they provide a false sense of security (as in New Orleans). Alternative forms also exist, such as super-levees (with houses and streets on top) and flooded levee zones or “polders” (with houses or wetlands floating on a wave-free “salt pond” inside).

From “Costs and benefits of using tidal marshes as a sea level rise adaptation strategy,” Bay Institute, 2013.

Beaches may also be an important part of adaptation. The Dutch have used huge new beaches on their high-energy ocean coastline to protect towns along the shore, combining wide beaches with high dune lines by dumping very large quantities of dredged sand in a spit-shape off the existing beach. Wind and waves carry the sand back to shore without need for bulldozers, as a natural way to build coastal habitat for birds and plants that are typically disturbed by heavy equipment but are adapted to winds and waves.

The Dutch Zandmotor near The Hague, July 2012. Photo from the Flickr stream of Zandmotor.

K. Hill and DIRT Studio proposal for Baltimore waterfront floating wetlands, attached to pilings.

DIRT Studio floating wetlands at Urban Outfitters Headquarters, Philadelphia.

5.0 P I E R H I S T O R Y

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The Berkeley piers, 1899 (USGS map).

The piers in their regional context (Oakland port and piers to the south), 1899.

1874 lithograph of the first (?) Berke-ley Pier and municipal ferry wharf.

1892 photograph of the aftermath of an explosion at the Powder Works on the Berkeley waterfront, with thepier in the background and Bath Beach in the foreground. The beach is now under fill, possibly located under I-80.

Berkeley piers, 1915.

Berkeley waterfront, late 1930’s, north is towards the bottom. Shows marina armature (later used as a “skeleton” for the fill material), Aquatic Park, and US 40 (now I-80).

Undated lithograph of early Berkeley wharf, serving Jacob’s Lumber. Note the steam train.

Berkeley marina, 1930’s postcard.

Smelt-fishing derby, 1950’s or 1960’s.

1949 USGS map of the pier.

Damage from a fire in 1961 isolated the far end of the pier from the segment closer to the shoreline, which was re-built in the 1960’s as a fishing pier. A gap was left between the re-built pier and its ruins for small boats to pass through.

Berkeley Pier postcard, 1990’s.

Structure on the beginning of the pier, 1998.

Wind-surfers on the Bay south of the pier (2010?).

Pier construction detail.

3D representation of pier in Rhino (Erik Jensen),

Seabirds perching on the ruins of the old pier, 2012.

(Left) Night-fishing for bat rays off the pier. (Right) Casting nets for herring.