Estuary Commons

The All Bay Collective (ABC) was created to build resilience through a collaborative and interconnected approach to infrastructure, the environment, social equity, and governance.

The team is a diverse group of locally based and globally experienced professionals, academics, and students that includes economists, affordable housing policy experts, landscape architects, architects, engineers, scientists, data experts, planners, and community engagement specialists. Together they have an extensive record working closely with cities and communities in the Bay Area and around the world building consensus; understanding and mapping vulnerabilities; writing policy; and planning, designing, and delivering iconic projects that mitigate and adapt to climate change and build resilience.

ABC includes AECOM, CMG Landscape Architecture, UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design, and California College of the Arts, in association with the Berkeley Center for New Media, The Terner Center, IDEO, Silvestrum, SKEO, modem, and David Baker Architects. Our community partners include the East Oakland Collective, Oakland Climate Action Coalition, Scraper Bike Team, Merritt College Brower Dellums Institute for Sustainable Policy Studies, Planting Justice, HOPE Collaborative, East Oakland Building Health Communities, and Repaired Nations.

Source: Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge

The complex mix of urban, ecological, social, and economic challenges confronting San Leandro Bay are both confounding and inspiring.

ABC’s vision is deeply informed by the history of this estuarine environment, the urgent challenges facing the communities that surround it, and the longer-term risks we can now only glimpse. Designing for resilience requires us to think differently about how resources and places are shared, and we must recalibrate how communities, government agencies, and private entities co-create their socioeconomic and physical environments. Working together with stakeholders and community organizations through a process of learning and co-creation led the team to Estuary Commons.

The idea of a commons derives from a rich political and urban history. It joins people and place through shared management of resources for the benefit of all. A commons is at once the public process of governance and civic life and the spaces that bring us together. ABC envisions Estuary Commons as a network of communities joined in mutual obligation to share and manage the resources of a working urban landscape. Locals have been referring to San Leandro Bay as “The Estuary” for years, and Estuary Commons reaffirms this community-conceived identity and speaks to the shared place, process, and path forward that will drive resilient outcomes for generations.

Source: Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge

All Bay Collective proposes four interrelated approaches:

1. Catalyze existing, on-the-ground actions while helping establish conditions for long-term community equity and resilience;
2. Adapt the estuary to protect against flooding, restore ecosystems, create pathways, and provide gathering space;
3. Stitch together neighborhood and shoreline through new transportation and ecological corridors;
4. Prosper by leveraging public assets and private investment through community driven planning to deliver equitable, environmentally just, and resilient development.

Source: Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge

Next steps for the Estuary Commons project are categorized into 5 general recommendations from the team:

• Educate and inspire local resilience planning with fun and easy tools, by hosting “train the trainer” sessions with community and agency representatives on the team’s community toolkit.
• Learn from each other through a peer-to-peer best practice network. ABC will hold a series of webinars to share best practices in local resilience, bringing together advocates from communities boldly addressing similar challenges.
• Put the community first and support developing a Community Benefits District (and beyond) in East Oakland. This would provide a community-driven framework to implement local resilience strategies and support the health, wealth, and stability of its residents.
• Instigate feasibility studies and concept analyses for the Arrowhead Marsh expansion and Doolittle Drive horizontal levee; undertake creek widening and restoration actions at Arroyo Viejo, East Slough Channel, and Hegenberger Greenway; and establish the missing Bay Trail link between High Street and Tidewater Boating Center.
• Teach the next generation of Bay Area leaders through continued academic-community engagements.

Source: Resilient by Design | Bay Area Challenge