Every child has the right to grow up in an environment where they feel safe and secure, have access to basic services, clean air, and water, can play, learn and grow and where their voice is heard and matters. This is the mantra of UNICEF’s Child Friendly Cities Initiative. San Francisco is part of the first cohort of cities taking on the initiative since August of 2020.  The voices of Malcolm X Academy (MXA) students who live in Bayview Hunters Point are a foundation of this studio, as 5th graders, they have specific ideas and visions of what their neighborhood needs. This studio will listen and collaborate with these students to amplify these concepts through speculative studio projects with concrete starting points. A multidisciplinary team (MXA teacher and principal, CCA AEL & Benthic Lab, Y-PLAN, Kulima, and SF Planning) have joined forces to work with the studio to elevate community solutions while implementing environmental justice fundamentals, using a multi-generational strategy for long term resilience.89% of the students at Malcolm X Academy come from low-income families. Bayview Hunters Point is a former military, industrial, and isolated area of San Francisco, with a long history of being a food desert with lack of access to grocery stores and fresh produce. This studio will be sited within Bayview, on the southwest bank of Islais Creek to demonstrate an architectural understanding of the links between, and local barriers to, climate resilience, public space, racial equity, and work with this target community to reduce these barriers. In June 2021, the Islais Creek Adaptation Strategy (ICAS) Final Report was released. It provides a set of pathways to protect the Islais Creek Shoreline from coastal flooding and sea level rise through 2080. The studio will be guided by this report’s vision to design projects which adapt to flood risks while ensuring healthy and resilient communities.Approach Biologists define an ecotone as a region of transition between two biological communities. In nature these two communities create edges that are legible but equally capable of growth, adaptation and change.The historical settlement of the San Francisco Bay shoreline, like many urban estuaries, has been one of modifying naturalized edges in favor of fixed vertical surfaces engineered for specific hard infrastructures like piers and seawalls. Islais Creek, the largest watershed in the San Francisco peninsula, over time was gradually channelized and filled in to create new land for development. These types of infrastructural projects have created physical shoreline boundaries, marginalizing communities like Bayview Hunters Point from water access and leaving a legacy of polluted soil, underemployment and urban segregation. The pandemic has only exacerbated these economic and historical inequalities.The studio will focus on two adaptation pathways indicated in the ICAS report,introduce a floating pedestrian bridge at the end of the creek that connects the north and south banks of the creek to an expanded Islais Creek Park with waterfront public accessdesign a flood proof architectural development within the designated ‘opportunity area’ Teams will work to envision an architecture with interconnected goals of climate resilience, racial equity, food security, community leadership capacity and neighborhood economic opportunity.

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