The Presidio is, and will remain, a source of San Francisco's most contentious planning and design proposals. But the reason for the controversy isn't all bad, according to John King: "everyone sees their own potential paradise."
"The wonder of the Presidio of San Francisco is that it blurs the line between city and nature to the point where you can’t pull the two apart," writes John King in a recent column that followed his attendance at the "Bridging the Nature-Culture Divide: Saving Nature in a Humanized World" conference organized by the Cultural Landscape Foundation.
As a location for the event on this subject, King writes that he "can’t imagine a more appropriate setting than the former Army post, now part of the three-county Golden Gate National Recreation Area. Within its boundaries there are 870 buildings, more than half of them classified as historic, amid forests planted by the military in the 19th century to soften what then were windswept dunes."
King cites numerous other examples of the Presidio's work over the centuries throughout the article before concluding by describing the value to the city and region offered by the ongoing project of restoring and managing the Presidio.
FULL STORY: How the Presidio entwines nature, urban ecology
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City of Albany
UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies
Mpact (formerly Rail~Volution)
Chaddick Institute at DePaul University
City of Piedmont, CA
Great Falls Development Authority, Inc.
HUDs Office of Policy Development and Research