The Pájaro Valley studio is a multi-year course at UC-Berkeley.

Overview: The Pájaro Valley studio began in 2022 to support the region with landscape architecture, environmental planning, and urban design visions for addressing regional concerns. Our primary focus has been on examining climate change’s effects on the region, in particular its impacts on the local agriculture industry and on the region’s infrastructure and institutions. As such, we engaged the local community throughout the 2023 Winter Storms and its recovery and reconstruction.

Studio Structure: We call the studio course “community-inspired.” Each year, we partner with the Watsonville Wetlands Watch to answer a question of interest to their organization and constituents. Students then work to answer the question using a framework of usable imaginaries (adapted from Billy Fleming, 2021), or imaginative projects that remain grounded in the realities of physical and planning restrictions. As such the projects below seek to address core issues, but push the bounds of what is viewed as “attainable” to help incite investments into the community in core areas and/or change the discourse around what is possible in the Pájaro Valley.