Trickle Down

San Diego’s Civita Park transforms a quarry into a high-level hydrological system.

PATRICK SISSON

WATER Occupying an artificial gash in the land that was once a sand and gravel quarry, San Diego’s recently expanded Civita Park spills down a hillside in the Mission Valley neighborhood. It’s a creation that, owing to the meandering Civita Creek, treats much of the water used to irrigate the park itself, with separate systems for graywater and blackwater. “This is green infrastructure for a changing, volatile climate,” says JT Barr, ASLA, the president and managing partner of Schmidt Design Group. “The strategy was to make the water treatment an integral part of the park experience, not a highly engineered and rigid system.” The linear Civita Park functions as a green spine for a 230-acre, 4,000-unit townhome development. At the bottom, long, flat green fields stack up like tables, offering…

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Landscape Architecture (Digital) - 1 Issue, October 2024

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