Experimental Land Use Turns Asphalt into Opportunity
Last month, an empty parking lot in the once-blighted East Village neighborhood of Downtown San Diego transformed into a vibrant, eco-friendly outdoor community space, home to a coffee shop, restaurant, dog park, beer garden, music venue and a rotating assortment of food trucks. Now open seven days a week, Quartyard hosts a number of cultural events from farmers markets to film festivals and outdoor concerts. Quartyard’s utilization of sustainable and innovative design offers a unique outdoor experience unlike any currently available.
Quartyard was dreamed up by a trio of Architecture students at the NewSchool of Architecture and Design for their thesis project. The group (now called RAD Lab) aimed to turn the dead lot across the street from the NewSchool into a lively hub, and attract retail tenants to attract people. As part of their thesis work, the creators of Quartyard discovered that historically vacant lots are often waiting for development by owners of the property or the city, absent immediate intentions and sometimes funding for development. In many cases, vacant lots blight their surroundings and drag down property values.
The lot is owned by Civic San Diego, a City-owned non-profit that is the entrepreneurial development partner for targeted urban neighborhoods. Civic San Diego is a self-described "one-stop shop with a Neighborhood Development Toolbox that lets us move quickly with public-private development projects and programs." Civic San Diego was born when the State ended Redevelopment in 2012, and the agencies that handled San Diego's redevelopment merged.
The City has long-term plans to turn the lot into a mixed-use project, so RAD Lab had to propose a temporary development for Quartyard. Their solution was to use upcycled shipping containers.
"Essentially, the Quartyard is a placeholder for future development," David Loewenstein of RAD Lab says. If a building goes up, the Quartyard comes down (or moves). If other development gets delayed, the Quartyard might hang on.
RAD Lab had to work to convince the conservative City government that Quartyard was a good idea. San Diego has been notoriously cautious in terms of planning. Part of the long process of obtaining City approvals involved rewriting the city's conditional use permit rules, which along with construction issues delayed the opening by about six months. Pop-ups like Quartyard hold appeal for more cautious cities because they allow for experimentation without a long-term commitment, and can stimulate business.
Instead of waiting for long-vacant lots to be taken over by the next developer, urban planners and designers are finding ways to turn those underutilized properties into attractive and useful neighborhood features, even if those elements prove temporary. This "tactical urbanism" project seems to be a win-win all around for the City, the landowner, the residents and the businesses, and we will likely see many more projects like Quartyard popping up around town.
