Imagine Ocean Beach 20 years from now.
Envision small, so-called “smart” cars and bicycles zipping down traffic lanes. A pedestrian-friendly walking and biking path ushers and steers visitors and residents through the community.
In this hypothetical future, Ocean Beach residents are doing their part to mitigate climate change and taking the “go green” concept to another level. It is a vision under which gas-powered vehicles are banned for four days out of the week.
The air seems a little crisper, pedestrians are perhaps a little leaner.
Visitors driving from Interstate 8 into Ocean Beach now park their vehicles in the 930-vehicle underground parking garage sitting under the baseball fields of Mission Bay Park and Robb Field. Once parked, pedestrians would stroll over the grass-covered bridge and through a visitors center encased in glass. They walk over Sunset Cliffs Boulevard to await alternative modes of transportation.
At the other end, visitors would rent bicycles, pedicabs, smart cars or simply stroll through a now foot-friendly, sustainable Ocean Beach that generates more energy than it consumes using solar-powered photovoltaic technology.
Is it the future or just pure fantasy?
If students at Woodbury University’s urban design program Downtown build on their incubatory concept to achieve such an end, the ideas could someday become reality. The students revealed their final projects April 30 as officials from the university’s architecture program critiqued the concepts and visions.
The futuristic urban-planning project is the brainchild of 25-year Ocean Beach resident and architect Steve Lombardi, who also owns and operates his business from Ocean Beach.
Lombardi said he hopes the project spurs a long-term vision for Ocean Beach ” and for San Diego as a whole ” during a time when the city and its communities are updating individual community plans.
“The city doesn’t have a big vision about the future,” Lombardi said. “If you don’t have a big vision, the land development code would be stagnant and stay exactly where it is and [not] promote change.”
With the elimination of cars as a premise for the assignment, Lombardi let students’ imagination run wild to envision a futuristic Ocean Beach, with each group of students recasting the community in a big-picture scenario.
Teresa Obrego, a fourth-year architecture student in her first year at Woodbury University, said her project involved the redesign of a pedestrian and environmentally friendly Jungle Java coffee shop on Newport Avenue.
Obrego, who also attended the Pride Institute in New York, said the projects in the class required research ranging from digging through city documents in order to identify local traffic patterns to interviewing business owners around the sites to generate community feedback.
Her project turned the Jungle Java into a pedestrian-friendly, energy-generating social scene that fit with the entire vision for a sustainable Ocean Beach, she said.
“It’s definitely something that is feasible,” she said. “We concentrated on more than just public transportation.”
Other students, like fourth-year student Greg Vergara, envisioned an outdoor amphitheatre at Cable Street and Newport Avenue.
His project incorporates the local music scene that has become almost synonymous with the community.
Other projects depicted a futuristic and wavy-looking Ocean Beach Pier that looks a part of the ocean itself with lifeguard stations made of a light-sensitive material that would glow dimly at night, said student Michelle Carsella.
Whether these projects may become reality is anyone’s guess, but Lombardi’s focus is to get the city thinking about the future.
Though he hasn’t approached city officials with an official presentation, he said any change would have to occur from within City Hall Downtown.
He said the city would be wise to use local universities to do research for these types of long-term proj-ects.
“This is how Downtown could use academia to work to do research on proposals like this, where they have the time and the resources, and work with the city to promote how the city could change their ways,” Lombardi said.
Similar citywide projects have been proposed by students at the University of California, San Diego.
Though Lombardi has not approached local community planning boards with some of the emerging ideas, he said he would like to be involved in the rewrite of the land development code.
Ocean Beach Community Planning Board chair Landry Watson said he’s never heard of the Woodbury University students’ project but said Ocean Beach community planners should be open to new ideas.
“I would love to see these proj-ects,” he said, “We haven’t seen it and we’d love to see what these young, scholastically minded young people have come up with,” Watson said.