San Diego 2072: The Final Iteration

After my HighEcology concept was selected to move forward, I developed the final project with a partner (name redacted for privacy) for VIS 162, spring 2022. Where the solo pitch was impressionistic, this one was grounded in actual climate data for San Diego County. The stakes got more concrete — and so did the proposals. Get it? Concrete!

The solo pitch started with a feeling — the texture of a future city, its bees and holograms and repurposed concrete. The final project started with data, and the data was not reassuring.

San Diego County is projected to warm by four to nine degrees Fahrenheit on average over the coming decades, with a fifteen to twenty-five percent decrease in fall and spring precipitation and a corresponding increase in drought frequency and intensity. Climate warming superimposed on the region's already pronounced spatial temperature variation will likely produce range shifts for many species — novel community assemblages, phenological mismatches, structural changes to ecosystems that have taken millennia to stabilize. More frequent and intense heat waves will disproportionately affect younger age classes across species, reducing reproductive and survival rates. San Diego is, by scientific consensus, a biodiversity hotspot — which means the stakes of getting the next fifty years wrong are unusually high.

That was the foundation my collaborator and I were working from when we developed the final iteration of the San Diego 2072 project.

The proposal expanded significantly from the HighEcology pitch. Where the solo concept had focused on repurposing highway infrastructure and restoring native ecologies, the final project took on the city at a larger scale — county-wide, coastline included, with interventions designed to respond specifically to the climate projections rather than simply to a general vision of a greener future.

Several proposals defined the final design. Wildlife barriers — ecological corridors that allow species to move through the landscape without direct contact with dense human settlement — became a central feature of the county map. The logic was straightforward: if climate change is going to force range shifts across dozens of species, the city needs to stop being an impenetrable barrier between the ecosystems those species will need to access. Connectivity, not separation, as the organizing principle.

The coastline presented its own set of challenges. Sea level rise, combined with increased drought inland, made water infrastructure a priority. The final project proposed desalination plants as a primary water source by 2072, alongside artificial water reservoirs and canals designed to channel water toward wilderness areas rather than simply managing it away from human settlement. Artificial islands off the coastline — a more speculative element — served both as potential desalination platforms and as protected ecological zones, removed from direct development pressure.

Downtown San Diego, in this vision, had continued to densify vertically rather than sprawl horizontally, freeing up more of the surrounding landscape for ecological recovery. The transportation network had shifted — personal automated transport replacing private car ownership, the highway footprint reduced and partially converted, the city's relationship to its own ground fundamentally changed.

What the data made clear, and what the design tried to honor, was that effective conservation in this context cannot operate at the scale of a single species or a single building. The projections call for landscape-scale planning — interventions that account for the spatial and temporal reach of climate variation, that build resilience into natural systems rather than simply protecting individual elements of them. A desalination plant is not interesting in isolation. It is interesting in relation to a wildlife corridor, an artificial island, a canal system, a densified downtown, and a coastline that has been given permission to change.

The HighEcology pitch imagined a feeling. This project tried to earn it.