Transforming San Francisco's Civic Center with Urban ReVision

If the individuals at Urban ReVision get their way, San Francisco's Civic Center will be undergoing a pretty drastic transformation, and many other cities may follow.  According to Eric Corey Freed of Urban Revision and Organic Architect, this transformation may significantly alter the way traffic flows through and interacts with the area.  Urban ReVision was tasked to come up with a new design for San Francisco's Civic Center, in order to address the fact that the district has a lot of activity during the day but becomes a ghost town at night. According to Eric, part of the issue behind this is that nobody lives in the Civic Center, and the businesses reflect that.

In order to figure out what they could do to transform the Civic Center into a 24 hour space, Urban ReVision conducted a workshop where they looked at the current users of the space, the users who they want to bring to the space and the needs of those individuals. They then took this information and came up with architectural plans and ideas to address these people and needs. This sounds like pretty exciting stuff, and I personally am excited to see the Civic Center transformation.

Urban ReVision is a diverse group of people focused on changing the urban landscape by re-imagining all the components that make up a city block. From energy to transportation to commerce to community, they believe that by finding innovative, healthy and sustainable ideas to help revitalize one urban block, they can create a blueprint for better cities everywhere.

About the speaker: Eric Corey Freed is the principal of Organic Architect and author of Green Building for Dummies. He also holds a position at Urban ReVision.