Jason Maas-Baldwin
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| Success Stories ~ Jason Maas Baldwin |
Can the city of Surfers Paradise live up to its name?
Coastal and Watershed Science & Policy graduate student Jason Maas-Baldwin spent two very intense weeks in Australia's Gold Coast helping develop an urban plan to ensure that it does. Jason traveled to Surfers Paradise as part of a team of 20 international interns from EDAW, a renowned design firm with 34 offices worldwide.
The Surfers Paradise city council challenged the EDAW interns to develop a 100 year plan for the coastal town facing rising sea levels and a growing population. "For two weeks, we worked 16-18 hour days," says Jason, who was the sole scientist on the team. Most of the other interns had backgrounds in landscape architecture or city planning.
"Water played a major part of the 100 year plan, and my role was to advise the architects and designers. I helped them develop the kinds of design forms that would work with the environment and identified areas not to develop, areas with critical natural process not to be disturbed.
"My background as a research scientist put me in a unique position. I had never worked in a studio environment where ideas were not bounded by the constraints of scientific uncertainty."
Over the course of the two weeks, Jason was challenged to reconcile his views, based on scientific approaches, with the need for a slick, marketable plan. Another intern, Chen Chen from Shanghai Tongji University in Hong Kong explained that Jason's ideas needed "a sexier cover that sells the ecology by describing the unique experience."
"This principle may be common to those from the design profession," says Jason, "but it was new to me."
Jason's emphasis on sustainability and respect for the unique natural setting did become a central part of the end vision. The group's final presentation, entitled "Intertidal Urbanity" imagines the future Surfers Paradise as "an international icon, where the attraction lies not in its excess, but rather in its radical and cutting edge integration with its spectacular natural environment."
The group's presentation to the city council and the public was well received and now it's up to the city to implement the plan. Following the presentation, Jason returned to the U.S. and spent the remainder of the internship working in EDAW's San Francisco office where he had a hand in a number of other environmental consulting projects.
Now, having completed the internship, Jason is back on campus working on his master's thesis, an evaluation of 20 urban stream restoration projects in the Bay Area. "Urban restoration evaluation is tricky," says Jason. "In a wild river project, the primary concerns are the ecological and physical restoration. With urban river restoration, the ecological concerns can take a backseat to the culture of the area or the need for flood control. But when done properly, it is possible that the restoration provides flood control, enhances the ecology, and becomes a renewed cultural location within the community."
Jason's evaluations will take all three factors into consideration. When he completes the study, he will provide the results to the California Department of Water Resources, the primary funder of urban river restoration projects in our state.
After earning his master's degree, Jason plans on pursing a teaching career. "My dream is to take outdoor education to the high school level, to work on applied projects with high school students that get them into the field or on trips to other countries.
"I had a realization at the end of my undergrad career that the reason we have higher education is to provide a place for us to deeply explore our own interests and foster new interests. At that point I became a true lifelong learner, more interested in learning than passing a test or getting a grade in a class. I realized how much fun it is to think...I want to go into teaching for the love of learning and give people the experience I had, make them actually enjoy learning. Hopefully they'll come to understand that at a younger age than I did."
Even if he came to that understanding late, Jason has made the most of it in his time at CSUMB.
~Liz MacDonald, Senior Writer/Web Editor
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