Expanding Our Community: Longer-Term Impacts of Dreaming Spaces at Pier 70

In 2023, CAST was asked by Brookfield Properties to partner with the Noonan Artists and the broader arts community to create a vision and goals for the new 90,000-square-foot arts center at Pier 70 and facilitate a design process that centers and elevates artists’ voices. The process began by determining the needs and vision for the new Noonan artist studios that would be incorporated into the new building and what other potential cultural and artistic uses should exist at Pier 70.

Dreaming Together

A foundational element of our work is engaging with the community, and we have developed our Dreaming Spaces process to center artists, cultural workers, and the community in real estate development. Each Dreaming Spaces engagement is unique, informed by the community impacted by the building site, the neighborhood and its residents, and the surrounding arts and cultural ecosystem. Through facilitated workshops with designers, planners, and technical experts, our goal is to strengthen the capacity and agency of our community partners to secure spaces for creative placemaking, place-keeping, and belonging. Dreaming Spaces enables us to build trust and community; together, we co-create guiding principles to support the dreams of the community and ultimately translate their goals into the real estate project at hand.

Dreaming Spaces at Pier 70 was centered on two communities. The first was the Noonan Artists, currently located at Pier 70, and the second was the broader arts community of the Bay Area. 

To aid in the design of this concept development plan, we collaborated with Jensen Architects because of their deep roots with the Bay Area arts community, experience with projects in the Dogpatch neighborhood, and our prior history of working together on CAST’s first two pilot projects: CounterPulse and Luggage Store Gallery.  Our first planning workshop engaged the Noonan Artists in a Dreaming Spaces process to listen, learn, and share ideas about their goals for their artist studio spaces.

For our second workshop, we reached out to a broader network of 200+ artists, cultural workers, collectives, and organizations, starting with the surrounding neighborhood and expanding to regional voices across the Bay. The goal was to identify the greater arts community’s position regarding the project vision, gauge their interest and preferences for space types, programs, and building features, and provide a safe space for sharing their thoughts and opinions. The Noonan Artists were also included in this workshop.

What Artists Said Mattered Most

The Dreaming Spaces process surfaced key priorities and insights from participating artists that helped shape the project’s next steps. When asked what success for the arts center would look like, common themes emerged:

• Affordability: “There’s little value if people can’t afford to be here. Permanence means breaking cycles of displacement.”
• Honoring Diversity of Cultures & Art Forms: “It’s about centering people and the cultures they represent.”
• Equity-Centered Approaches: “Equity means everyone owning our share.”
• Community Connection: “This space should be a hub that brings artists together across disciplines and generations.”
• Sustainability & Accessibility: “Creating a space that lasts, that serves the Bay’s artists long-term.”

From Vision to Action

We could have just looked at the 200+ folks we connected with and the report summarizing the engagement as an important output for the Pier 70/Noonan Artist Dreaming Spaces process and called that a success. Job complete. 

However, inspired by Ruby Lerner’s RESET framework, there was a perspective shift to go deeper beyond output and ask: 

• How did Dreaming Spaces help clarify our common goals? 
• What was the outcome, or what changed due to our work? 
• What are the longer-term impacts of the Pier 70 engagement?

Did Dreaming Spaces help clarify our common goals?

The top elements of a thriving arts center that surfaced through the Pier 70 Concept Development/Dreaming Spaces process with the broader arts community, including the Noonan Artists were: Be affordable; Honor diversity of cultures and art forms; Be equity-centered; Be accessible, inclusive and engaging.  

These themes continue to be central recurring priorities identified by the communities we encounter through our work, regardless of size, scale, or location, and thus remain core features to CAST’s developing projects. The process of bringing together a range of individuals–artists, architects, planners, and folks who center arts and culture in their work in youth development, senior housing, and government–to connect further around these common design goals was also refreshing for those who participated in this iteration of Dreaming Spaces. 

“I was just grateful to be welcomed into the artist community as a social justice architect, we’re often left out of the conversation but, like CAST, we thrive at the intersection of place, culture, and finance,” shared Garrett Jacobs, Director of Project Evaluation and Research at Designing Justice + Designing Spaces.

“It was great to meet so many different artists from the Bay, and I know many others who were not at the table, who operate a little deeper in the community who would also contribute to the conversation for next time. I’m glad the topic of equity was a popular one; it makes me curious as to how CAST can leverage their position with larger developers to advocate for equitable ownership solutions for culture keepers in all neighborhoods.” 

What was the outcome?

The Pier 70 project created so many opportunities for meaningful connection and learning for CAST. With Pier 70 as the premise–this big and exciting new project!–we had new conversations with new individuals and new organizations. What we learned through the process, though, went beyond just what could be applied to that specific project and informed how to approach any cultural facility development–more universal principles like considering multi-generational impacts and the informal, unplanned uses of any community facility.

As part of our community engagement around Pier 70, we did 1-1 listening sessions, online and in-person focus groups, and an online survey. 95% of those who completed the survey were new organizations or artists who were new to CAST.

What emerged from many of those initial conversations was a connection, a potential to build with different arts groups or artists and go deeper. This new relationship cultivation has opened doors to explore collaborative opportunities with other groups like Zaccho Dance Theatre and Minnesota Street Project.  Pier 70 may have been our entry point into these first interactions with groups unfamiliar with CAST, but it has since led us to other exciting projects and possibilities that reinforce the need for an arts-real estate intermediary like ourselves.

“For community engagement at CAST, changing the real estate paradigm starts with self-reflection every time we engage with art & culture workers in the community–we share what we are learning and most importantly where do we go from here to there, together,” said CAST Community Engagement Manager Patricia Zamora. “These conversations are foundational, they are with a new and broader web of artists, cultural workers, and community around the bread and butter of securing space, creative placemaking, and ultimately belonging in our Bay.”

What are the longer-term impacts of the Pier 70 engagement?

Part of the job in community development is to ensure that we are constantly learning, adapting, making connections, and always thinking about how the pieces of development projects can come together in new and exciting ways. There is a level of uncertainty and unpredictability inherent in this process, but also a spirit of opportunity and creativity. This is especially true at Pier 70 where the project seeks to expand the creative community throughout its development. At CAST, we embrace all aspects of the work while also keeping a certain level of persistence to ensure that we are honoring our commitments to the communities with which we engage.

Our projects are never just about space. It always comes back to the community. The breadth of people we got to talk to through Pier 70 was notable and informed us how we can work to make our real estate projects more inclusive and thorough.  To create a lasting home for artists in a city that has seen so many pushed out, Dreaming Spaces at Pier 70 is a step toward a future where artists don’t just survive in the Bay Area—they are the designers of community spaces, they are essential agents of change, and they are provided the resources to thrive. 

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