Civita Park and Surrounding Neighborhood

I finally took a little trip to Civita Park and the surrounding neighborhood. The neighborhood is still a work in progress but it’s an encouraging development that we need more of in San Diego (and in the rest of America’s over-priced cities). The park itself is great, with a variety of amenities, including water features, open fields, basketball courts, play areas, performance spaces, and quieter, landscaped areas. I’m encouraged by the design of the park, and the surrounding community.

Park Design

In general, the design of Civita park is well thought-out, it’s won numerous design awards as a result. It’s a large park, which helps, but there are a wide range of amenities that appeal to numerous uses, from basketball courts to large grassy areas, the usual play structures, hardscaped areas for farmers markets and events, community gardens, and some great areas to just sit and relax.

Density

The neighborhood surrounding the park is pretty dense – four to five story residential buildings are typical for the entire neighborhood. We need to build more densely, and this area is a great example of what needs to happen elsewhere. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind seeing even more density with few taller buildings sprinkled in, but this development is probably a good vision for a minimum level of density for anything new in San Diego, or the surrounding communities. It’s always a shame to see more low-density sprawl of single family homes being built anywhere, but it’s still a common occurrence even in the rural areas of southern California. It’s a shame that this style of development isn’t required for those non-city locations as well.

One of the great biproducts of this level of density is the commercial spaces that are possible as a result. In most parks around the US, parks usually aren’t adjacent to commercial amenities. Directly across from the park entrance are new restaurants and shops. I can grab a burrito or pizza, walk across the street to the park, and enjoy my meal on a blanket before throwing the frisbee or football with my little one.

Travel Connections

It’s too bad that more parks like this aren’t in every neighborhood. In a perfect world, everyone has access to a park similar to this within a walking distance to their home. Unfortunately, that isn’t the world we live in, and because of this, parks like this are visited from a wide range of people from outside the neighborhood.

There is a light rail stop just under a mile from Civita Park, which is mostly on fairly busy roads. However, it’s fairly easy to imagine a more ideal path between the Rio Vista light rail stop and the park, through the current Rio Vista Shopping Center parking lot (again, not hard to imagine high density residential here), and a pedestrian bridge over Friars Road. Hey, I can dream! (if I’m really dreaming, I can design a park all the way between the transit stop and Civita park – there is already a nice little plaza north of the transit stop, we just need to redevelop that shopping center with a central park down the middle and extend a small part of Civita Park south to Friars Road).

Note: After some web searching, it does appear as though there is at least a proposal for a pedestrian bridge, and some amount of pedestrian connection between the new neighborhood and the transit stop.
The entire San Diego River corridor is an interesting place that could be more strongly tied together with rail and bike corridors. There are decent walking and biking paths along some portions of the river. As those continue to be developed, additional bike paths branching out to reach new neighborhoods like this one could create a pretty spectacular network of parks, neighborhoods, and nature.

More Please

It’s sometimes discouraging to see our nation’s growth patterns, but every once in a while good developments get built that can provide some hope towards the future. Civita Park is great, and the neighborhood surrounding it definitely offer a glimpse of what could be.