Event: City Discover Lab hosts the "Transforming Seattle's Waterfront, Transit, and Community"

By: Ray Gastil, AICP

Bio: Ray Gastil AICP serves on the Seattle Design Commission, and as president of the APA-WA Puget Sound Section. He consults on planning and development initiatives. He has directed public planning office in New York, Pittsburgh, and Seattle, and taught and researched urban design and planning at Carnegie Mellon University, UC Berkeley, and Penn State.

City Discovery Lab is launching its first Washington State session, “Transforming Seattle, Waterfront, Transit, and Community,” this summer, August 2 to August 6. The program offers immersive planning-oriented city-based educational experiences (with AICP continuing education credits). It started in Barcelona last year, where Jordi Honey-Rosés, Research Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB), curated a deep dive into the policies and practices changing the city’s future, from the collective cycling of “bike buses”  to multiblock pedestrianized streets, to massive infrastructure and redevelopment. This year, City Discovery Lab has initiated new programs in New York, Barcelona, and this August, in Seattle.

As a Seattle-based city planner with experience in New York, Pittsburgh, and Seattle, I was eager to join the Barcelona cohort in May 2024 to learn firsthand how planners, architects, activists, parents, and elected officials had made new, powerful urban prototypes, like the green, pedestrian-oriented superblocks, with inspiring urban design and art. It wasn’t just about the end result, it was focused on the hard work, technical, political, and social that it took to get to the finish line—and they’re still working on it. I reported on what I learned in the Seattle-based online publication, Post Alley, in “Rethinking How the City Works: Barcelona’s Superblocks.”

To develop a program for Seattle, we asked ourselves how we could have a similar range of forums, site visits, and discussion as the Barcelona program, and how could we illustrate the Seattle approach, including its complexity and challenges? In response, the Seattle Discovery Lab focuses on Seattle’s capacity to combine huge projects—whether at the regional scale of Link light rail, city scale of the Central Waterfront and Lower Duwamish River--with the closer in scale of community is the organizing idea for the program. From the macro level of systems to the micro levels of streets and sidewalks to the in between of districts and neighborhood. How do these projects happen, and how do they balance their different levels of impact, and how do they sustain the adaptability of a work in progress even after the major capital projects are done?

The program is based at the new citizenM Pioneer Square hotel, near the south end of Seattle’s Waterfront Park. The next three days, which include forums, tours, group meals, and kayaking, focus on three major sites. The first day starts with the central waterfront, and its connections to existing neighborhoods, from Pioneer Square to Pike Place and Belltown, where the mural festival installation will be underway. The second day turns to transit, at scale and at the station level, and the community-related Transit Oriented Development, for light rail and bus transit, from the Capitol Hill multimodal-oriented development to Midtown Square in the Central District. The third day is on the waterfront, again, but this time on the long-industrial Lower Duwamish. Kayaking with the River Access Paddle Program, meeting with the Duwamish River Community Coalition, and learning from scholars working to catalyze just circular economies are on the program. Speakers during the multi-day session range from Marshall Foster, who has directed planning, waterfront initiatives, and Seattle Center for the City, to Rico Quirindongo, Seattle’s Director of the Office of Planning & Community Development, to Paulina Lopez, director of the Duwamish River Community Coalition, to Richard Krochalis, former FTA Regional Administrator, to Aaron Asis, artist and art festival organizer, to Catherine De Almeida, University of Washington landscape architecture professor.