Landscape Architect Articles

The U.C. Davis West Village: Largest U.S. Planned Zero-Net Energy Community06-09-16 | Feature

The U.C. Davis West Village: Largest U.S. Planned Zero-Net Energy Community
Landscape Architecture by SWA, Sausalito, Calif.

The Village Square in the West Village, a U.C. Davis campus neighborhood, offers plenty of bike racks for the student commuters. Many of the students, faculty and staff make use of the U.C. Davis Unitrans Bus Line, which provides pick-up and drop-off services every 15 minutes from the square. Unitrans is operated by the Associated Students at U.C. Davis. The bus drivers are all U.C. Davis undergrads. The use of bikes and the buses greatly reduce the dependency on vehicles in the West Village. Those with electric vehicles have access to charge stations in the parallel street parking.
*Photos: David Llyod/SWA*

International landscape architecture, planning, and urban design firm SWA in Sausalito, Calif., provided key planning and landscape strategies for the nation's largest planned zero-net energy (ZNE) community for the University of California, Davis (U.C. Davis).

U.C. Davis (home of the "Aggies) is a 5,300-acre campus in the city of Davis, California, a college town of about 68,000 in Yolo County, about 20 minutes east of Sacramento. U.C. Davis has an enrollment of over 35,000, and offers 104 undergraduate majors and 96 graduate programs.

The Village Square has a convenient mix of retail stores and dining for campus residents. The subtle use of grade changes at the Village Square creates a raised retail promenade lined with "Little Leaf' Linden trees adjacent to the amphitheater lawn.

You may recall the viral video of the campus policeman that directly pepper sprayed seated student "occupiers" in the face. Yes, it occurred on the normally quite U.C. Davis campus. The date was November 18, 2011. Yes, it's been that long!

A unique public-private partnership between U.C. Davis and developer West Village Community Partnership (WVCP) made the project possible. Initially conceived as an "environmentally responsible campus housing project," the 225-acre neighborhood West Village project ultimately transformed into a community that uses "zero net electricity from the grid, measured on an annual basis."

SWA developed a five-mile network of bicycle trails for the U.C. Davis West Village. The pathways that snake through the Freemont cottonwoods by the Ramble student housing connect walkers and cyclists to the campus core.

SWA provided master planning, site planning and landscape strategies to help realize the ambitious vision. SWA's sustainable initiatives support the project's core principles of housing affordability, environmental responsiveness and quality of place. The new campus neighborhood will provide housing for 3,000 students and 500 staff/faculty families within a network of parks, stormwater ponds and corridors, bicycle and pedestrian trails, a community college and retail and recreational services.

Energy Initiative
In 2003, U.C. Davis launched the West Village Energy Initiative (WVEI) in cooperation with WVCP to study energy efficiency measures, with an initial target of 50 percent reduction in consumption compared to the California Energy Efficiency building code. By 2008, the WVEI proposed that West Village could become a ZNE community without sacrificing quality, and at no increased cost to the developer or consumers.

The bicycle trails fulfilled the objective of assuring that each residence is no more than a quarter mile from the campus bus line. The Ramble multiuse path sparingly and strategically places lawn areas along the trail as communal passive recreation spaces. As at the housing courtyard, London planetrees border the way.

Phase 1A of the West Village development is now complete, housing 1,944 students at 99 percent occupancy. Phase 1A also comprises 42,500 square feet of retail/office space and a leasing/recreation center, located on the Village Square, an open, communal space. The ground floors of the mixed-use Village Square buildings comprise the university's first "uHub," or innovation center, which includes the Plug-In Hybrid & Electric Vehicle Research Center and the Western Cooling Efficiency Center.

"All parties saw tremendous value in reaching these goals," said Robert Segar, assistant vice chancellor for campus planning and community resources at U.C. Davis. "If one path toward zero net energy didn't work, we were willing to try another path. The phrase "zero net energy' was central to this; its absolute clarity became our guiding principle."

Ramble student housing courtyards have handy bike parking, along with landscaping of Japanese "Green Beauty' boxwoods and large Columbia London planetrees for shade.

SWA's site planning and landscape strategies for the West Village development encompassed three major areas: energy systems; community-wide connectivity; and high-performance landscapes.

SWA worked to integrate energy conservation and onsite energy generation in a functional and aesthetic manner, in harmony with local environmental conditions. SWA conducted analyses at regional, site, and building/garden scales to maximize opportunities for passive cooling, proposing to arrange buildings in loose clusters to allow breezes from the Sacramento???,??EURoeSan Joaquin River Delta to waft through the site.

At the base of the amphitheater lawn are magnolia trees and landscape grasses: Foerster's Feather Reed, Foothill sedge, Japanese Blood, Blue Grey rush and Purple Needle. The grasses help filter and absorb surface runoff before it enters the storm sewer.

Note: The Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers mingle with Pacific Ocean water to create the West Coast's largest estuary. SWA also proposed the planting of shade-giving deciduous trees, reducing the need for air conditioning.

Based on the area's flat topography and the well-established bike culture at U.C. Davis, SWA posited the bicycle as the site's primary mode of transportation. SWA developed a five-mile network of bicycle trails, offering access to community destinations and the main campus. This network also connects to other transit, fulfilling the objective of locating each residence no more than a quarter mile from the campus bus line.

Each student housing courtyard features outdoor living rooms for studying and socializing. Concrete block seating, picnic tables, barbecues and waste/recycle receptacles (Victor Stanley) are the amenities. This courtyard is set off by rows of "Swan Hill' olive trees, the fruitless variety.

To achieve a high-performance landscape, SWA integrated drainage into the site's system of parks, sports fields, trails and gardens.

Stormwater drains to the site's large northern ponds, where it is purified by native wetland plantings in a series of basins. The slopes of the site's ponds incorporate native shrubs and trees, selected in cooperation with U.C. Davis' horticulturists, botanical garden curators and ground and maintenance personnel. The landscape provides a sustainable habitat for migratory birds, while also providing a visually appealing natural landscape for residents year-round.

"SWA was the one point of continuity in the design and implementation," said Segar. "They met the university's goals of community-scale natural drainage, landscape strategies, plant selection and coordination with our horticulture experts, as well as big-picture ZNE goals."

The custom shade structure at the Village Square doubles as a meeting place for residents and as a band shell/stage for special events. The architects specified this in their drawings. The shade is a joint design effort of Studio E/SWA with Carmel Partners (the developer) as the installer. Energy efficient, dark sky-friendly outdoor lighting is used throughout West Village, but occasional opportunities for decorative lighting accents are used as well.

U.C. Davis' internal monitoring shows that the West Village community achieved an exceptional 87 percent of initial ZNE goals in its first year. In 2013, West Village received the ULI Global Award of Excellence, which honors outstanding development in the private and public sectors, with an emphasis on responsible land use.

This Poligon shelter is part shade structure, part trellis, with a mesh (Greenscreen) for the climbing vines to attach to. The colorful bike racks (right) are from Creative Pipe.
Photo: SWA

About SWA
Established in 1957, SWA www.swagroup.com is an international landscape architecture, planning and urban design firm. SWA has studios in Sausalito, Los Angeles, Laguna Beach, San Francisco, Dallas, Houston, Shanghai, and the United Arab Emirates. Since its inception, SWA has worked in over 60 countries, and its design-driven projects have garnered more than 800 awards.

Photovoltaic panels provide shaded vehicular parking and contribute to West Village's goal as a zero net energy community. U.C. Davis reports it "flipped the switch" on solar photovoltaic installations back in January 2012 for the central campus building rooftops and a parking lot. There are now seven installations with 756 kW of production capacity, an average of 1,290,000 kWh per year, enough power to meet the energy needs of two large campus buildings for a year. This solar is a 20-year power purchase agreement with Mainstreet Power. U.C. Davis has its own solar power plant on the south campus that began producing electricity in August 2015. West Village has about 4 megawatts installed, and operates its own grid with service from Pacific Gas & Electric. The solar plant has a 16.3-megawatt capacity. U.C. Davis says the plant is the nation's largest "behind-the-meter" solar installation on a university campus. Inverters on site convert the power to AC. The system generates some 33 million kilowatt-hours per year, about 14 percent of the campus's electricity needs.

Project Team
Client: West Village Community Partnership, LLC: joint venture of Carmel Partners of San Francisco and Urban Villages of Denver
Landowner and public partner: U.C. Davis
Landscape Architects: SWA; master planning update; full service landscape design
Landscape contractor (phase 1): Carmel Partners
Architects: Moore Ruble Yudell; Mithun; Mogavero Notestine Assoc.; Lim Chang Rohling & Assoc.; Meeks+Partners
Architects, mixed-use (phase IA design and construction): Studio E Architects
Architects, student housing (phase IA design and construction): MVE Institutional
Architectural renderings: Bay Illustration Studio
Civil engineers (implementation plan and phase 1): Cunningham Engineering
Energy consultants (phase I): SunPower; U.C. Davis Energy Efficiency Center
Environmental consultant (implementation plan): GreenWorks
Faculty/staff housing (phase I design): Lim Chang Rohling & Assoc.
Infrastructure: Teichert
Sacramento City College Davis Center (Phase I): Los Rios Community College District
2003 Neighborhood Master Plan (U.C. Davis Long Range Development Plan): MIG

Manufacturers
Country Casual: Benches
Creative Pipe: Bike Racks
Gardco: Pole Light at Parking Lot, Pedestrian and Bike Paths
Greenscreen: Mesh for Trellis
Pavestone: Concrete Pavers
Poligon: Custom Trellis
Quick Crete: Planter Pots
Victor Stanley: Picnic Tables; Trash/Recycling

As seen in LASN magazine, June 2016.