Lake Merritt Master Plan
North Basin Strip
The North Basin is a 20-acre park unit within the McLaughlin Eastshore State Park in Berkeley, California, a waterfront area defined by WRT’s General Plan to establish an activated waterfront balancing recreation and habitat. Years later, WRT was hired by the East Bay Regional Park District to lead a community planning process and prepare a conceptual design that addresses user needs and climate change goals related to sea-level rise.
Recognizing a common challenge in community engagement processes, where a few dominant voices in the room dictate the design, WRT, with partner Susan Moffat, created the award-winning New Voices Partnership program to bring equity to the core of the design process through training, capacity building, and listening.
The result was a waterfront the East Bay could be proud of, including a sunset promenade, places for gathering, landscape stewardship, education, walking and biking, water access, habitat protection, and resilience designed for the end of the century.
The Berkeley and East Bay community has a plethora of established voices and passionate opinions, ranging from habitat and recreation advocates. Many communities in the East Bay lack access to an engaging waterfront, and this project designed a program to better engage those communities and ensure their voices were part of the planning process.
The design of this waterfront addresses both human access, recreation, and habitat through recognizing the need for both the human hand in restoration/stewardship as well as the need for habitat buffers. Areas of the site are dedicated for waterfront enjoyment and activation while other areas are considered habitat priority zones where stewardship would allow for the restoration of a native habitat and provide a safe space for sensitive species.
The New Voices program helped build future collaborators and leaders for the client, East Bay Regional Parks, which has now outlasted this single project. The process has helped restore trust with communities in the East Bay that the district wishes to better serve. Once implemented, this design vision will provide the East Bay with a waterfront they can be proud of.
