Baylands Design Charrette

The Arroyo Group performed a five-day design charrette to assist Metis Environmental Group and the City of Brisbane envision an appropriate level of development on the 733-acre Baylands, a vast brownfield located immediately to the south of the San Francisco city limit. The western half is a former railyard, and the eastern half is a former landfill, creating myriad environmental concerns which informed site planning. This complex project involved balancing issues including pollution concerns, regional housing needs, preservation of community character, view protection, transit-oriented development and potential new High Speed Rail infrastructure.

The illustrative design reserves 40% of the site as open space, including the most environmentally sensitive and Bay-overlooking areas, and connects them with a trail system to the existing Brisbane community and new development. The design illustrates the reuse of some of the landfill areas as a high-amenity tech campus, while the former railyards to the west of the Caltrain tracks accommodate the needed housing and/or office development with supportive retail. The old roundhouse is adaptively reused into a unique food hall.

The design charrette ultimately assisted the City of Brisbane to formulate a development program for the site which reflected a compromise between the developer and community and was approved by the voters through Measure JJ in 2018, bring resolution to a more than decade-long political process.