Oakland Athletics turn to social media for latest Howard Terminal / Coliseum ballpark plan talk
The Oakland Athletics sent an email newsletter announcing plans for a Facebook Live event that teams Oakland A’s representatives with folks from San Francisco Planning and Urban Research (SPUR) and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG Architects). This is what it read:
The Oakland A’s and the San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (SPUR) are co-hosting a Facebook Live event with representatives from the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) design team today at noon PST.
The Facebook Live event will give fans the chance to learn more about the design plans for the new A’s ballpark at Howard Terminal.
The social media event will feature an opening presentation from the BIG design team, followed by a question-and-answer session. Fans are encouraged to submit questions for the panel ahead of time by replying to posts on the A’s Facebook (facebook.com/athletics) and Twitter (@athletics) accounts.
More About Bjarke Ingels Group BIG Architects
If you’re wondering what Bjarke Ingels Group is as an architecture firm, they described themselves in this way:
BIG is a Copenhagen, New York, and London based group of architects, designers, urbanists, landscape professionals, interior and product designers, researchers, and inventors. Founded by Bjarke Ingels in 2005, the office is led by 17 partners and is currently involved in projects throughout Europe, North America, Asia, and the Middle East. BIG’s architecture emerges out of a careful analysis of how contemporary life constantly evolves and changes. Not least due to the influence from multicultural exchange, global economic flows, and communication technologies that together require new ways of architectural and urban organization. BIG believes that in order to deal with today’s challenges, architecture can profitably move into a field that has been largely unexplored.
As for SPUR, San Francisco Planning and Urban Research was an organization this blogger was keenly aware of, yet never joined when in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley’s Planning School. Frankly, I have perceived SPUR as trying too hard to be intellectual, rather than interested – and more pointedly, interested in how planned developments spark social change, positively or negatively. Thus, the fact SPUR is described on its own Wikipedia page as once having a “the aspiration San Francisco’s “population will move closer to ‘standard White Anglo-Saxon Protestant’ characteristics” pretty much describes the reasons I avoided getting really involved in it, after considering membership. But that’s another story; I hold out hope SPUR gets better.
Oakland A’s Community Relations Effort Is Beyond What Others Have Done
Since the announcement of the plans for a dramatic new ballpark at Howard Terminal and a new design for the Oakland Coliseum, the Oakland A’s have went on an aggressive and very public community relations effort that featured a kind-of town hall meeting at the baseball organization’s Jack London Square Headquarters and many many events since October of last year. Zennie62Media’s Richard Haick was there for last week’s gathering:
Overall, it’s difficult to argue that the A’s have not been willing to talk and to listen regarding their quest to build a new ballpark in Oakland. In this process, the David Kaval-directed A’s are causing this blogger to ask why neither the Golden State Warriors or the Oakland Raiders tried to seriously build a stadium in Oakland? And was the reason truly connected to it’s majority-minority population?
Time for honesty.
For more on today’s Facebook Live online meeting, click here.
Stay tuned.