The Balboa Avenue Station Area Specific Plan, designed to guide transit-oriented development around the additional Blue Line Trolley stop, has been adopted by the City of San Diego. The Specific Plan has prescribed land use designations in order to support these developments and achieve a “thriving, mixed-use urban environment that provides multiple opportunities for living and working” near the Balboa Avenue Transit Station (The City of San Diego, 2018). 

This increase in urbanization will look something like an additional 15,000 people and 4,500 dwelling units. The area faces a unique opportunity to improve the quality of the site. However, perpetuating the existing conditions of silo-ed zones and separation among communities through zoning falls short of fulfilling the Specific Plan’s mission.

This investigation intentionally ignores the planned and existing zoning, as well as the rules of separation, and focuses instead on the layering of program and use in order to provide a more integrated, engaged, and walkable neighborhood in which
people can live, work, and play.

Zoning designates use and simultaneously the lack of use. When we implement
zoning, we implement separation, disconnection, and isolation, a fear of
difference, conflict, and other. Citizens in their communities’ experience this
both physically and socially. The contemporary urban space is complex and created through interactions. The site is examined and reconfigured
through this lens. By cultivating architecture to function as a mechanism for
activation, the potential for neighborhoods to become a place for people results.