HighEcology: Imagining San Diego in 2072

The solo concept pitch I developed for VIS 162 — a speculative futures and sustainability course — during my junior year, spring 2022. My idea was selected to move forward into a team final project, which became its own iteration. This is where it started -- and honestly, I think the idea has real viability.

An overwhelming feeling of closeness. Everywhere I walk, it permeates, oozing saturated colors and blue screens amidst an occasional chirp from a passerby. The air feels alive. Basking in the golden rays, the normalcy of my surroundings struck me as I was introduced to my new home in its pre-spring glory. There are bees flitting around, landing on little purple flowers a quarter the size of my littlest fingernail. As my manicured nails gently touch the bush that houses the petite flowers, a few fall to the ground below. Their fragility adds to the beauty of the scene before me. Just by sitting down in the center of the walkway, I am made aware of conversations between people I may never see again in my lifetime, of hovers and bikes whizzing past, and the overarching breeze that carries an herbed scent in the wind. The bright azure sky is peppered with whorls of clouds that lazily drift across the sky, and yet always leave my sun uncovered so I can bask in its warmth. I wish I could freeze this moment in time: me, sitting in solitude and yet surrounded by an environment that buzzes with life. It is as if electricity has become one with the wind, allowing various holograms to merge with the landscape of palm trees and made lakes. I'd heard stories of the before, of a time when cars whizzed by, semis dragged goods from their origins, and the Great Heat was the biggest issue encroaching on life. Yet it wasn't all bad, if grandmothers are to be believed. The foundations of half a century ago still stand, supporting the walkway I traverse upon, the homes we inhabit — the fabric of our society. It's as if haunted grounds have been given a new life, now covered in vines and little purple flowers that beg distraction from screen-saturated work.

That is San Diego in 2072, as I imagined it. Not a clean break from the present, but a layering — old concrete given new purpose, the city's skeleton still visible beneath its vines.

The concept was called HighEcology, and the premise was specific: rather than expanding into greenery, use what already exists. San Diego's highway infrastructure — overengineered, built to hold tonnage and survive disasters — becomes, in fifty years, a vertical opportunity. Below the elevated structures: housing. Alongside them: walkways, parks, water reservoirs. The concrete stays; everything around it transforms.

The rationale was straightforward. By 2072, personal car ownership will be a relic. Automated personal transport — hoverboards, self-driving bicycles, small individual vehicles — will have displaced the logic that made highways necessary in the first place. The shipping industry will have followed, shifting away from large trucks toward methods that no longer require the same infrastructure. That leaves vast expanses of reinforced concrete running through the heart of the city, and the question is what to do with them.

The answer I proposed was not demolition but reinvention. Three proposals, specifically.

The first: convert the space below elevated highways into housing and communal walkways. The existing structure can bear the load. The footprint is already urbanized. Building there means not building somewhere else — not encroaching further into the ecological corridors that San Diego, as a biodiversity hotspot, cannot afford to lose.

The second: repurpose old office buildings and former highway routes into what I called park offices — open, solar-powered workspaces embedded in green corridors, where people could gather as needed without the fixed overhead of a traditional office. The pandemic had already demonstrated that physical presence is optional for most knowledge work. The question was what presence should look like when it became a choice rather than a mandate — and my answer was that it should look like being outside, surrounded by colleagues and also by plants.

The third: stop insisting that landscapes conform to a fixed aesthetic. San Diego's ecology — its native chaparral, its coastal sage scrub, its riparian corridors — has been suppressed for decades by imported plants and managed uniformity. By 2072, I imagined a city that had largely stopped fighting its own landscape, allowing native ecologies to reclaim space alongside human infrastructure, with intervention reserved for genuinely invasive or parasitic species rather than anything that simply looked unfamiliar.

The earliest version of this concept was larger and less resolved — underwater cities, floating platforms, integrated architecture across multiple scales. I had a mental picture that I couldn't quite articulate, which is often where the most interesting ideas live before they've been disciplined into something communicable. What emerged through iteration was HighEcology: smaller in scope, more specific, and therefore more honest about what speculative design can actually propose versus what it can only gesture toward.

The version that went on to become the final project — developed with a teammate, grounded in real climate projections for San Diego County — is a separate post. This one is where the thinking started: with a seat on a walkway, bees on purple flowers, and the question of what a city owes its own ground.