Wide Open Walls: Murals of Sacramento

Wide Open Walls is a 501(3)(c) whose mission is to promote and celebrate public art. Their annual festival in August brings both local, national and international artists together to transform our Sacramento region with amazing street art. This tour will be presented by the founder and producer of Wide Open Walls, David Sobon, and will take individuals on a walk to see the recently painted murals in downtown Sacramento. All proceeds from the tour will be donated to the Wide Open Walls Foundation.

Tour leader: David Sobon

Westward Sketchcrawl: from Town to Gown

Join us for an afternoon of urban exploration as we sketch our way westward from Sacramento to Davis. Accompanied by urban sketching enthusiasts, we will follow a transect from historical Old Sacramento, across the Sacramento River and through the delta, to the college town of Davis and the UC Davis Arboretum. Sketchbooks will be displayed on Saturday evening at a gallery for the Sacramento Art Walk as the culminating event of the conference. We are delighted to continue the tradition begun by the organizers of the inaugural CELA sketch crawl at CELA2013 in Austin, Texas.

Tour leaders: David de la Peña, Elizabeth Boults, Chip Sullivan, Richard Alomar, and Pete Scully

Golden 1 Center + Plaza 

Sports venues are defining landmarks in many cities but their lofty aspirations often go unmet. The typical venue sits on the outskirts, surrounded by parking lots, bulky and uninviting, idle much of the time, consuming costly quantities of energy and water when in use.

Sacramento’s Golden 1 Center reverses this model through close collaboration between AECOM’s urban designers, landscape architects, architects and engineers, together with an ambitious client.  The result is the first LEED Platinum arena, the world’s most sustainable indoor venue. A downtown arena imbued with regional culture, Golden 1 Center is a year-round hub of activity, a world-class entertainment destination and new heart of the city.  This includes giant aircraft-hanger doors which open to create a strong indoor-outdoor relationship between the plaza and interior concourse.  Additionally, an 8-foot living wall wraps the building, the plants reflecting the façade’s various microclimates.

The master plan as a whole restores the historic street grid, reconnecting old town, downtown, and midtown, forming the new Downtown Commons, DOCO, mixed-use retail district. With strong public transportation connections, DOCO with the arena at its center, welcomes the public daily with an open plaza for pre-event activities, farmers markets, or simply enjoying the shade trees, art and sculptured seating in a vibrant setting.

The tour will include visiting the plaza and DOCO development, together with a tour around the inside of the arena, led by AECOM’s lead landscape designer for the project.

Tour leaders: Blake Sanborn and James Haig Streeter from AECOM

Four Davis Eco-Villages (bike tour) 

On this bike tour we’ll look at four radically different models of ecological community, all within two miles of one another in Davis CA. We’ll start by renting bikes at the UCD Bike Barn, and will first visit the Domes, a student-built alternative community dating to the 1970s. Then we’ll move on to West Village, a new zero-net-energy neighborhood for 3,000+ students, faculty, and staff that opened its doors in 2010, designed in the style of a European eco-district. Next we’ll examine Village Homes, after 40 years still North America’s pre-eminent example of a sustainable suburban neighborhood. Village Homes features edible landscapes, community gardens, greenways, passive solar design of homes, on-site drainage, narrow streets, community spaces, and many other design innovations. The community is in the process of updating its landscapes for the 21st century to improve water efficiency, habitat value, and use of native species. Finally, we’ll stop at Muir Commons, America’s first designed-from-scratch cohousing community. Along the way we’ll check out Davis’ award-winning bike infrastructure, including bicycle roundabouts, underpasses, overpasses, grade-separated bike lanes, and traffic lights. During the tour we’ll discuss the strengths and weaknesses of each model of eco-village, and see what we can learn for our own work.

Tour leader: Stephen Wheeler

Campus Tomorrow: The 2018 UC Davis Long Range Development Plan (bike tour)

Please join us for a tour of campus as we pedal through campus history and envision the campus of tomorrow. The tour will emphasize the evolution of campus as well as the future development of the campus as represented in the 2018 UC Davis Long Range Development Plan, which was recently approved by the Board of Regents of UC. For more information please visit campustomorrow.ucdaivs.edu. The tour will also touch upon the Living Landscape Adaptation Plan and implications of climate change for the campus fabric.

Tour leader: Lucas Griffith

Co-Creating Place and Impact through Engaged Learning at the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden 

Tour the UC Davis Arboretum and Public Garden to learn how we are engaging students, faculty members and the community in co-creating our place, the UC Davis campus, through the GATEways Project (Gardens, Arts and The Environment) and growing the impact beyond our borders. Meet the leadership students in our Learning by Leading™ program who are helping us redesign our landscapes and programs to address real-world issues such as climate change, plant conservation, habitat loss, water quality and environmental literacy. By leading projects and mentoring other interns, these students gain leadership skills and the experience they need to make a difference here at UC Davis, in their own communities, and beyond.

Tour leaders: Kathleen Socolofsky, Bob Segar, Carmia Feldman, Andrew Fulks, Emily Griswold, Ryan Deering, Melissa Cruz, Mary Burke, and Haven Kiers

Natural lands dedicated to teaching and research: the UC Davis Quail Ridge Reserve

Set on a rugged and isolated peninsula one hour from downtown Sacramento, the Quail Ridge Reserve protects 2,000 acres of beautiful Coast Range habitat for research, teaching and outreach. A hilltop field station provides a scenic base for classes and groups. The reserve is a unique partnership between the University and the Bureau of Land Management, the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, the Bureau of Reclamation, and the Quail Ridge Wilderness Conservancy. For more information, see https://naturalreserves.ucdavis.edu/quail-ridge-reserve. This field trip will transport participants by bus/van across the Central Valley to Berryessa the mountainous wildlands around Lake Berryessa. A Natural Reserve employee can provide interpretation of the landscapes and communities traversed during the trip. Once at the field station, we will enjoy hilltop views, tour facilities and research project infrastructure, and talk about engaged learning activities at Quail Ridge and other UC Davis Natural Reserves. We will then set off on hikes that can be tailored to different skill levels. Along the way, we’ll look for reptiles and amphibians in our habitat array, and point out native wildflowers. 

Tour leaders: Shane Waddell and Jeffrey Clary

$50

Speculative Futures in The California Delta

California’s Sacramento- San Joaquin Delta was once the largest delta on the west coast of the Americas.  In the 19th and early 20th century, the Delta’s marshes and floodplains were radically transformed by engineered levees and canals to facilitate farming and shipping. In the mid 20th century, the Delta was further altered to become the central hub in the state’s vast water transport infrastructure. These transformations have led to sustained ecological and socio-political crisis in the region, where only one thing is certain: the Delta of the future will be vastly different from the Delta of today. This bus tour will lead participants through selected landscapes in the California Delta – such as multifunctional floodways, historic towns and deeply subsided polders – where infrastructural earthworks are being reconsidered and redesigned in ways that attempt to reconcile priorities of flood management, ecological recovery, water supply, sustainable local economies, and place-based values. The tour will include narration by local stakeholders and experts as well as the exploration of realized and speculative design schemes.

Tour leaders: Brett Milligan and Rob Holmes

UC Davis Self-Guided Tour

A map with a self-guided tour will be provided.