Designing Civicness

Written by USD Architecture Students in Megan Groth's Architecture 302, Urban Design Studio 

This year marks the 60th anniversary of the dedication of the San Diego Community Concourse - today, known as the Civic Center. In those 60 years, the City of San Diego has more than doubled in population and downtown San Diego has been planned, replanned and reimagined many times over.

While the uses and activities at the Civic Center have also changed over time, the site itself has never been completely renovated and it has long been at the center of redevelopment speculation. In 2022, Mayor Todd Gloria convened the Mayor’s Civic Center Revitalization Committee to “gather input and propose a vision for the revitalization of the Civic Center”; and earlier this year, the Prebys Foundation awarded the Downtown San Diego Partnership with funding to hire U3 Advisors to develop a series of options for the redevelopment of the six block site.

In January 2024, a one-day workshop of the Transborder Association of Architectural Education (TAAE) was convened with students from nine architecture programs in San Diego and Tijuana. During the workshop, students explored new visions for the Civic Center as well as shared and discussed ideas in a series of design sprints with local San Diego architects. From this work, an urban design studio at the University of San Diego was developed and a team of nine architecture students spent a semester analyzing the Civic Center site through the lens of civicness, accessibility, equity and urban repair.

The students began by studying the urban design qualities of the Civic Center’s public realm - a city of San Diego community park- in the heart of the site. They then compared the San Diego Civic Center to three important and well documented civic spaces in other parts of the world - Piazza del Campo in Siena, Italy; Lincoln Center in New York City; and Trafalgar Square in London - examining similarities and differences in urban design characteristics, evolution of the sites, renovations, civic qualities and public value.

Each student also chose a location at the Civic Center to propose an urban repair intervention that would improve and transform the current condition of the site to better address an issue that they identified in their research, grounded in their understanding of the precedents and their experiences inhabiting the place. The group developed a “Civic Center Urban Repair Manual,” which provides an optimistic vision of what a revitalized Civic Center could be for the citizens of San Diego today, tomorrow and for generations to come.

As we continue to combat the climate emergency through a myriad of different ways, we have to accept that we can no longer build the cities of the future in the same way as we have in the past. Viewing our cities as sites for repair, and not block-by-block demolition, is one effective way to keep building material out of our dwindling landfills, dramatically reduce our embodied carbon and achieve the climate action goals set forward by the city and county of San Diego, the state of California and the UN Paris Climate Agreement.

Furthermore, to take an approach of repair over destruction is to engage with the act of citymaking from a position of care - care for our shared history, care for our natural and built environments, care for our material culture and ultimately care for each other. Every day, thousands of people occupy the Civic Center, as they have for 60 years, shaping the place, inhabiting it and redesigning it over time. Maintenance of such a place is a civic act.

How do we strengthen our communities when we fix and reimagine the places we inhabit? How does this lead to a more collaborative approach to citymaking? And what foundations do we need to repair in order to build a stronger society for the future? We invite you to grapple with these questions as well through our “Designing Civicness” exhibition.

"Designing Civicness” is modeled after our classroom at USD. We invite everyone to sit at the table, to look at, discuss and share ideas together. In the words of anthropologist David Graeber, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make and could just as easily make differently.” Join us in thinking about how we could make the world, and the San Diego Civic Center, differently together.

“Designing Civicness” will be on display in the lobby gallery of the City Administration Building (202 C Street) from December 5-19th.

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