About 170 area residents, staff and faculty members, and students tried their hand at a low-tech version of the popular computer game SimCity during three hands-on community workshops last week.
Held Tuesday and Wednesday, the workshops were designed as part of the Long Range Development Planning process to foster community input and generate ideas on how to accommodate and allocate campus growth to the year 2015.
Bob Segar, assistant vice chancellor for campus planning, likened the game exercises to creating a city general plan.
Attendees at each event heard a brief overview of the campus’s growth projections and goals. They then retired in groups of about 10 people each to nearby tables. At each table there was a map of the campus and several "game pieces" – each of which represented a particular type of land use.
As team members struggled with where to place their pieces, they had to work within some predetermined objectives – like maintaining a 10-minute-or-less walk between classes, keeping residential communities accessible and affordable, ensuring a mix of uses around the core campus, protecting natural areas, being sensitive to traffic and parking demands, and clustering related facilities.
"It’s a balancing act; you’re playing a dominoes game," said Bob Sena of MIG Associates of Berkeley, a firm assisting the campus with the Long Range Development Plan during the next year.
A major component of the plan has to do with housing needs.
Currently, about 75 percent of the faculty, 40 percent of the staff and 90 percent of students live in Davis. The goal is to keep those percentages fairly constant as growth occurs and student enrollment climbs to a projected 31,000, Segar said. So the plan must find room for housing 5,000 more students and about 2,100 faculty and staff members. Also needed are about 2 million square feet of new academic and administrative buildings, new athletic fields, a new football stadium, and basic and emergency services – like schools, parks and fire stations.
Participants discovered that despite the main campus’s 3,700 acres and Russell Ranch’s 1,500 acres, available space around UC Davis is somewhat scarce. They were invited to reallocate some current land uses – for instance put a dorm on land that is currently home to a feed crop. But any piece of land that was taken out of agricultural or open space use had to be compensated for elsewhere. All existing facilities and properties were color-coded to indicate whether or not their current use could be altered.
Participants also could consider putting to use lands the campus has an option to purchase. This land includes the Kidwell properties – 551 acres south of Putah Creek along Pedrick Road, and about 130 acres along Interstate 80 due south of campus animal and avian research facilities – and the 726 acres of Hamel Ranch running along I-80 due south of downtown Davis.
Several MIG representatives of were on hand to facilitate the table discussions.
"Let’s not agree," Sena said, inviting discussion around the tables. "The idea is not to win the game. It’s to understand the complexities of the challenge and hear each others’ opinions and incorporate that into a plan to develop alternatives," he said.