Symposium Description

The symposium emphasized the Delta’s key role for infrastructure, agriculture, and open space within the San Francisco-Sacramento-Stockton metropolis.  It featured expert presentations and panels on the geomorphic setting of deltas and unique characteristics and functions of the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta, lessons from the flooding of New Orleans, examined the dynamics of urbanization in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and the surrounding region, and explored alternative futures for this critically important region.

Presentations included

  • a look at why the Delta Protection Act has not stopped development below sea level by the legislation’s author
  • whether levees can ever be “safe”?
  • the illusory nature of “safety” afforded by “100-year” flood protection
  • graduate student research that combined general plans, footprints for developments proposed in the outer Delta, aerial imagery, and other relevant GIS data layers, in a spatially explicit analysis of urbanization in flood-prone areas of the Delta
  • historical precedents for land-use conservation in critically important areas, such as the San Francisco Bay, the Santa Monica Mountains, and the Everglades
  • plans and designs by interdisciplinary student teams to implement alternative futures for the Delta, emphasizing preservation of the Delta’s critical infrastructure, agriculture, and enhanced open-space access, in the annual Tommy Church Design Competition, The California Delta: a once and future park.
Presented by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, the Beatrix Farrand Endowment, and the College of Environmental Design.  Co-sponsored by the Natural Heritage Institute; the Lee Chairs Program in Business, Environmental Design, and Law; the UCB College of Engineering; Haas Business School; Boalt Law School; and the Water Resources Center Archives.