Location:  San Francisco, California

Client:  Catellus

Mission Bay is a 303-acre urban mixed-use project which adds a new and vibrant neighborhood to the City of San Francisco. Johnson Fain led a multi-disciplinary planning and design team to develop a master plan for this new neighborhood that builds upon the City’s historic urban framework and open space system to establish its spatial and social identity.

The plan is reflective of San Francisco’s historical city fabric starting with the Mission Dolores and Vioget’s twelve-block survey of 1839.  The designers researched and studied the block structure of San Francisco and other cities throughout history to establish the optimum block dimension for Mission Bay.  The result is a block structure based upon the ‘Vara Block’ of 275 feet by 412.5 feet which is small enough for walkability and ease of pedestrian flow, yet large enough for efficient economic development.  Central to the master plan is the University of California San Francisco new biotech campus which provides the ‘critical mass’ and catalyst necessary for sustaining growth.

 

2015 aerial photo courtesy of Mission Bay Development Group, © 2015 Todd Quam, Digital Sky