Join SPUR for the opening of a new exhibition of design work developed by a group of UC Berkeley Master of Landscape Architecture students, under the direction of Professor Judith Stilgenbauer . The project sites — each the approximate area of a medium-sized urban park — explore site- and program-specific ways of combining time, process, ecology, and placemaking — ideas oftentimes considered to be divergent…

When a major earthquake strikes the Bay Area, the lives of San Franciscans will be enormously disrupted, and it could take months to reestablish essential services. San Francisco has a limited number of emergency-shelter beds, and its capacity to provide interim housing after an earthquake is constrained due to low vacancy rates and minimal vacant land. Estimates show that only 75 percent of the city’s…

In 2015, Market Street will be remade as the culmination of a four-year public process called the Better Market Street Project. Reclaim Market Street!, created by the Studio for Urban Projects, augments this ongoing community program by staging a series of interventions that engage the public in changing the street. Accompanying these events is an exhibition at SPUR that provides context for these pilot projects…

“STREET LIFE | YERBA BUENA: a community design initiative” will unveil a road map for ten years of improvements to the streets, alleys, parks and plazas of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena district. The exhibition, at the SPUR Urban Center Gallery, will introduce the recommendations of the Yerba Buena Street Life Plan, a community design initiative sponsored by the Yerba Buena Community Benefit District. The exhibition’s…

We have known about the perils of climate change for more than two decades. But global efforts to slow it down by reducing greenhouse-gas emissions have largely failed. Although we must do everything in our power to stop climate change, some of its impacts are now inevitable. Climate change adaptation — preparing for heat waves, drought, and sea level rise — is now essential. In…

SPUR presents Local Code: Real Estates , an exhibition by Berkeley faculty Nicholas de Monchaux . His proposal uses geospatial analysis to identify thousands of publicly owned abandoned sites, imagining this distributed, vacant landscape as the basis for a new, green infrastructure. The exhibition includes more than two hundred models of proposed designs for leftover space in San Francisco, milled from abandoned lumber, each lasercut…