Neeraj Bhatia & Blake Stevenson Awarded the 2016 Piero N. Patri Fellowship in Urban Design

Assistant Professor Neeraj Bhatia and Blake Stevenson (B.Arch 2017) have been awarded the 2016 Piero N. Patri Fellowship in Urban Design. Working in collaboration with SPUR and the Fellowship Committee, Bhatia and Stevenson will investigate the future of San Francisco’s Southeast Waterfront.

San Francisco’s Southeast Waterfront communities are undergoing significant change. Since the Patri Fellowship began in 2007, new communities such as Mission Bay and the San Francisco Shipyard have been built, dozens of residential developments have arisen along the Third Street corridor, the Hunters View and Alice Griffith public housing projects are being rebuilt to the highest standard and Candlestick Park has been demolished to make room for thousands of homes and hundreds of thousands of square feet for retail uses. Despite this growth, however, displacement remains a real threat and the families and neighborhoods of the Southeast Waterfront fear for their future.

In this final year of the Patri Fellowship, Bhatia and Stevenson will document the changing nature of San Francisco’s Southeast Waterfront and its communities. Using the results of the previous Patri Fellowship projects, first-hand research, photography and design, the fellowship pair will weave together a narrative that spotlights the changing nature of San Francisco’s eastern neighborhoods and the role of the fellowship in designing for the future of the area. Examining issues of livability, housing, transportation, open space and more, their proposal Beyond a Frontier seeks to answer the question: what lies ahead for the Southeast Waterfront and its communities?

What stands out in the Southeast Waterfront is it’s rich legacy of industry and cultures pushed up against discussions of its developmental capacity for 30,000 new residents by seizing the last frontier. Continuing with the Urban Works Agency’s interest in affordability through design, the $20,000 fellowship provides an opportunity to position how design can reconcile:

(i) different scales of development (from infrastructural to the local house),
(ii) various stakeholders, or agents (from the long-time resident, to the new resident, to the worker), and
(iii) distinct scales of time (from seeding catalytic tactical projects to recognizing longer-term strategic plans) in an effort to empower the local residents, industry, and the environment as key voices to the future of the South-East Waterfront.

For more information on the Patri Fellowship, click here.