Accessible Paths and Places Plan
Honor Award
Analysis and Planning
Berkeley, California, United States
Sasaki
Client: University of California, Berkeley
This project addresses inclusive spaces through landscape design, giving us a reference to rethink spaces for all and a benchmark for landscape architectural design.
- 2024 Awards Jury
Project Credits
Marc Fisher, Vice Chancellor
Wendy Hillis, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Campus Architect
Sally McGarrahan, Associate Vice Chancellor, Facilities Services
Ella Callow, Chief Accessibility Officer, Disability Access & Compliance
Ben Perez, Manager, Physical Access Compliance, Disability Access & Compliance
Nio Howa, Disability Access & Compliance
Marissa Cheng, Director of Planning, Physical & Environmental Planning
Humberto Castro, Senior Planner, Physical & Environmental Planning
Eddie Chau, Project Manager, Capital Projects
Project Statement
As one of the first institutions in the country to accommodate students with disabilities, UC Berkeley plays a leading role in advancing equal access within the built environment. This novel project advances UC Berkeley’s legacy of disability rights advocacy and provides a precedent for American institutions in addressing accessibility. The UC Berkeley Accessible Paths and Places Plan transcends the traditional landscape master plan to establish a future that centers disability in the built environment. The plan includes design solutions at multiple scales and moves beyond compliance to embrace human-centered design practices, focusing on each person’s unique experiences and sensory responses in the landscape.
Project Narrative
This project represents the first planning effort at UC Berkeley to comprehensively address accessibility across the Campus Park landscape. The plan prioritizes barrier-free accessible pathways of 5% slopes or less, leveraging ramps only when necessary, avoids tokenizing the accessible experience, reimagines associated quads, courtyards, and plazas, and reinforces legibility through material guidelines. The multi-year process was guided by a core team, campus leadership, and cross-sectional Working Group. Centering the human experience is at the heart of the effort. Rather than utilizing site visits for presentations, the team leveraged in-person time to conduct tours with campus stakeholders and campus leadership, test and iterate design options in the field using virtual reality, and visit sites including Tunnel Tops and the Ed Roberts Campus–a model for accessible design. Tactile models and braille maps enabled inclusive engagement and multi-sensory collaboration, while final documentation included both visual and braille final reports. The team also hosted a public Human-Centered Design Event to share themes and lessons learned on the topic. The team analyzed prior planning documents including the Campus Master Plan, Landscape Heritage Report, and ADA Transition Plan, which included a GIS database that highlighted 42,000 instances of ADA non-compliance. The team synthesized and visualized this data into cross-slope and running-slope diagrams that informed priority areas of intervention. This data was supplemented with surveys to confirm pathway slopes, topography, site features, tree condition, utilities, environmental setbacks, capital project footprints, & accessible entries. Ground floor plans were integrated with slope data to understand accessibility at indoor-outdoor thresholds. The resultant plan situates 37 discrete landscape projects across 7 corridors, nestled within an overall accessibility framework. Each project identifies existing slope deficiencies, proposed slope strategies, site features to be retained or removed, earthwork analysis, sections, perspective views, and plans to achieve thoughtful compliance. Proposed projects address accessibility while also promoting placemaking to reinforce the campus landscape identity. The projects go beyond compliance to embed human-centered design practices focused on mobility, vision, hearing, and cognition. By centering campus design on accessibility, it becomes a driver of the campus’ identity. Cost estimates for each project give the university the ability to make capital requests and a roadmap for implementing the project over a 20 year horizon. The accessibility framework operates as a simple and intuitive wayfinding system for all users, leveraging a new system of subtle grooves on existing standard materials. The grooves work as a visual and haptic texture, providing continuous and real-time feedback for blind individuals using canes. Interacting with grooves in a parallel or perpendicular approach denotes its cardinal direction. With input from the disability community, UC Berkeley has already begun piloting and refining the grooved treatment to realize the initial segments of the accessible network. A final outcome of this effort has been the conversion of campus stakeholders into disability rights and accessibility advocates, elevating accessibility in dialogue and decision-making at multiple levels, which has already proven critical in implementing the vision.