Berkeley SOSIP
Produced by the
Preservation Institute
Overview
Replacing the State Health Dept Building
For me, there is a strong symbolic resonance to replacing a modernist highrise with a fine-grained urban fabric of walkable streets. It is a rejection of modernist urbanism that reminds me of the demolition of the Pruitt-Igoe housing project, shown above. But it is even better, because the modernist urbanism is being replaced by an urban fabric created in a piecemeal way, like traditional urban fabrics.
Overview
Berkeley's Street and Open Space Improvement Project (SOSIP) involves a large number of improvements proposed for downtown streets in the city's downtown plan.
This web site discusses the improvements in the SOSIP that I personally want to focus on, and it includes my suggestions for other improvements to be added to the list already in SOSIP. I am focusing on a series of small changes that could have a huge impact cumulatively and that I find symbolically resonant because they involve replacing an ugly example of modernist urbanism with a fine-grained network of pedestrian-friendly streets.
I support virtually all of the improvements proposed in the SOSIP. The fact that I am focusing on some of the improvements here certainly does not mean that I am against the other improvements. I am selecting these improvements to focus on because I think they are politically do-able and because they are personally meaningful to me.
The map provided by the city (below) gives an overview of the entire SOSIP. For more information, see the city's web site at http://www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/SOSIP/.
