Course Overview

Overview

SF=San Francisco=Subsistence Future

San Francisco, a city of 3/4 million people, must secure its own food, water, and waste disposal, within the limitations of available renewable energy produced, within its contiguous geographic provenance. The rules are 1) no one starves and 2) zero energy input from hydrocarbons. What measures must be taken to keep a densely populated peninsula alive and prosperous? What is the ecological footprint of a truly sustainable San Francisco? What are the political, geographic and social boundaries of this Brave New World? This mapping seminar will take a data-driven look at possible landscape futures by deeply mapping the systems necessary for various subsistence levels and modeling the footprints they require for the San Francisco and neighboring eco-regions. Part I will be an intensive research and “deep mapping” of San Francisco’s spaces, systems, flows and ecologies. Part II will be a speculative modeling of one or more landscape futures, remapping appropriate boundaries and rethinking physical organization of the urban landscape.

Course Description

San Francisco’s urban landscape is the functioning matrix of connective tissue that organizes not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic events and processes that move through them. Our current taxonomy of landscape and infrastructure: parks and open space, wildlands, green space, urban voids, community gardens, utility rights of way, etc. is limiting in terms of understanding the capacity of urban landscape to either inhibit or support human and non-human habitation in a dynamic future challenged by climate and resource scarcity.

Green infrastructure is defined as “Green infrastructure is strategically planned and managed networks of natural lands, working landscapes and other open spaces that conserve ecosystem values and functions and provide associated benefits to human populations.” This also implies the modification of infrastructure, urbanism, and landscapes toward a privileging of production. Understanding San Francisco’s productive capacity can enable urban citizens to better prepare and respond to the changes likely to occur following a major disaster, population shift, or fundamental change in economy, transport, peak oil and peak water scenarios.

As a basis for the investigation we will consider some of the following questions:

• What if we wanted to triple our food production in the city, where would we begin?
• What is the water storage capacity of the city’s stormwater infrastructures?
• What can we anticipate in terms of the future of air quality in the city?
• What is the carrying capacity of the city from the perspective of food shed and watershed?
• What does a post peak oil and peak water San Francisco look like?
• What are the consequences of our individual choices relative to these existing systems?

Course Structure

Phase 1: OVERVIEW

Course instructors will provide an overview of the current understanding of San Francisco’s Food, Water, Waste, Energy, and Air Systems. Students will be introduced to resources for further exploration of each of these systems

Phase 2: RESEARCH

Students will receive in-class assignments to trace the origin and destiny of specific systems elements

Phase 4: PRODUCTION

Mapping and analysis will be followed by graphic interpretation and visualization of organization, movement, and energetic exchanges of specific systems elements.

Phase 5: BOOK/EXHIBITION

Students will compile posters and a small book for self publication and exhibition at the San Francisco Exploratorium.