It’s a blustery, early spring day in the Eastern Coachella Valley, or ECV. The basin is tinted green and purple by wildflowers and grasses encouraged by a surprisingly heavy rainy season, a departure from its usual brown. Wild yellow mustard pokes through the asphalt road edge, and palm trees stand shoulder to shoulder in orderly military rows. These shaggy, shady oases are date orchards, managed by commercial growers that have been in the valley for generations. Since 2011, the nonprofit Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) has worked in this landscape, painstakingly building relationships with community members and leadership as well as county and state politicians to address the need for public space. KDI’s approach is remarkable because it values residents over a finished product. Throughout the process, residents find the confidence to speak out on their own behalf, and the design team listens.
A smoggy layer of dust tints the surrounding mountains. Over the day, the dust will turn from a mere haze on the horizon to a wind-blown menace—a haboob blocking the sun, forcing drivers to turn on their hazard lights, and coating everything with grit. The elements here are increasingly unpredictable due to climate change. This rural, agricultural landscape at the northern edge of the Colorado Desert is often prone to misinterpretation.
Tourists visit the nearby Salton Sea (the ancient bed of Lake Cahuilla) to look at the midcentury ruins of abandoned resorts while catching a sulfureous whiff of the dying lake habitat. The artificial “sea” was created at the turn of the 20th century by diverting water from the Colorado River, and in the 1950s it became a popular vacation destination for fishing and waterskiing. The dream soured by the 1970s as agricultural runoff contaminated the lake and the water became increasingly salinized, killing off the fish. Rotting fish littered the banks for decades.
With such an ugly environmental history, it’s easy to label this place a wasteland. The historian Samia Henni, author of Deserts Are Not Empty, describes a “regime of emptiness” and warns that such blindness leaves people and ecologies victim to extraction, exploitation, and pollution. To dismiss the ECV as wasteland erases the farmworkers who live in small enclaves on tribal land and in trailer parks around Mecca, Oasis, Thermal, and North Shore, all names that conjure up the fantasy that once defined this place.
Within these conditions KDI created the ECV Productive Public Space Network, an initiative that uses landscape architecture, urban planning, and organizing tools to create projects to serve and empower the people who continue to live around the Salton Sea. In March, members of the community gathered under a gazebo in one of the few public parks in the area with the KDI team, faculty and students from the UCLA Luskin Center for Innovation, and representatives from the Riverside University Health System for a kickoff event as part of the Eastern Coachella Valley Shade Equity Master Plan. In a place where temperatures exceed 100 degrees for more than 100 days of the year, shelter is necessary but unequally distributed.
Air-conditioning and covered patios with misters are common in the suburban west valley, but in the eastern rural areas it is rare to find even a bus shelter, leaving residents exposed in extreme heat. For the gathering, KDI installed demonstration shade elements, including clustered potted fig trees, tents, and temporary sun sails attached to existing palms. The impact was immediate: The metal play structure was cool to the touch under the sails, and people sat at tables under the tent filling out a questionnaire about their own heat vulnerabilities.
“From May through October, it is very, very hot here, and so it is almost a bellwether for what other places in the world will look like,” says Kelly Turner, an associate professor of urban planning and geography at UCLA and associate director of the Luskin Center for Innovation, who is leading the heat equity research.
Limba Contreras, a retired librarian and president of the Oasis Leadership Committee, stepped to the podium. “Thank you for putting Oasis on the map,” she said. “People come to the valley and think it is a paradise, but then they feel the heat. There’s no shade, no water. We’ve been abandoned for a long time, but we do need help.”
No shade, no water
The Eastern Coachella Valley Shade Equity Master Plan is funded by a grant from the California Governor’s Office of Planning and Research. Master plans are usually the beginning of a project, with design and construction to follow, but KDI reversed the process. The project began with a single park design fueled by community advocacy and slowly grew into more parks. Those projects revealed the need for a mobility plan, leading to an area heat impact study and a 2022 prototype for a rainbow-striped bus shelter, which generated the planning and organizing around shade.
Chelina Odbert, Honorary ASLA, founded KDI with classmates Jennifer Toy; Arthur Adeya, International ASLA; Ellen Schneider; Kotchakorn Voraakhom, ASLA; and Patrick Curran when they were students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and working in Kibera, a large, informal settlement in Nairobi, Kenya. Located near the city center, Kibera is dense, with no space to develop parks or public space—the opposite of the ECV. Yet despite the differences, Odbert found similarities. “There’s vacant land as far as the eye can see, so you think these places are nothing alike,” she says. “When you start to dig deeper you realize that priority needs [like] clean water, decent sanitation, [and] safe places for kids to play are exactly the same. The physical context changes, but the underlying issues are the same.”
Trailer park communities are often unpermitted and woefully unregulated, especially when it comes to water and sanitation, though they are essential affordable housing in a place that has little. According to KDI, there are more than 120 such sites in the eastern valley. St. Anthony’s Trailer Park, KDI’s first project in the Coachella Valley, opened in 2013 along Highway 111 near Mecca. Created in partnership with the Pueblo Unido Community Development Corporation, it followed the highly participatory process that the team used in Kenya: research, workshops, and listening. Residents were asked to envision and codesign a place that reflected their basic needs while allowing for cultural dreaming. The result is what KDI calls a “Productive Public Space” and includes a wooden stage for performances and play, raised beds for growing fruit and vegetables, and a shade structure.
A similar call and response shaped a more recent project, Oasis del Desierto Park. The first phase opened in 2021 and includes a soccer field, a playground, and restrooms. Located across the street from a trailer park in Oasis, it serves the farmworkers and their families who live there.
The studio has an office in Coachella, the small town made famous by the music festival, led by Christian Rodriguez Ceja, who has a background in community organizing and serves as a planning commissioner in his hometown of Indio. Rodriguez Ceja’s parents were farmworkers who lived in a trailer park when he was young, so he’s intimately familiar with the social and economic hurdles it takes to get any project off the ground. As I drive around ECV with Odbert and Rodriguez Ceja, they narrate the complexity of working in this rural community and the various constituencies.
“The players are municipalities, the farmers, the community,” Rodriguez Ceja says. “There’s also a large network of nonprofits in the area that has been built in the last 10 years to start advocating for changes and improvements.”
Case in point: Nuestro Lugar, aka North Shore Community Park, completed in 2018. It’s a more robust design than St. Anthony’s and expresses a decade’s worth of lessons. The program-rich park reflects the desires of multiple interests. There’s a pavilion and grassy lawn for events and gatherings like quinceañeras, a playground with water features, a basketball court, a skatepark, and a soccer field. KDI worked closely with residents to develop the park’s theme, From Sea to Sky, and helped establish spaces and programming with partners Delicias Laguna Azul, a women-led food cooperative, and the bicycle co-op Desert Riderz.
North Shore, a census-designated area about 15 minutes from Mecca, is home to about 2,600 people. For decades, the air reeked of rot. “You don’t have the kind of big fish die-offs and the odors as you did, because they have all unfortunately died,” Odbert says. “But in the beginning, you could come here and all you would see for the first 10 feet of the shoreline was floating dead fish.”
Environmental and conservation experts who work on the area tend to focus their research on the ecology of the Salton Sea but overlook the humans on its banks. According to Odbert and Rodriguez Ceja, the local rates of asthma and emergency visits for nosebleeds were multiple times higher than elsewhere due to the odors and dust blowing off the exposed lake bed. “I’ve lived here my whole life and have all of these health problems that my neighbors also have, but there was no conclusive data saying there’s a direct link,” Rodriguez Ceja says.
KDI amplifies the experiences of community members through advocacy and education. It is also working with the state of California to help revitalize the Salton Sea State Recreation Area and make it a place where locals want to go. Slowly, things are changing. The Salton Sea Authority, a joint power authority working with the state, notes that any mitigation strategy must deal with a “Triple Threat of ecological, economic, and human health disasters converging at [the] same time and place.”
Design, advocacy, and education
Odbert navigates down Grapefruit Boulevard and past fields green with soybeans and chard. As we reach North Shore, water comes into view. The surface glitters, choppy from the high wind. It’s easy to imagine why this area was once a resort destination. She drives through the residential neighborhood built on the foundational grids of the earlier development and populated by a largely Latino demographic. Odbert points out a pocket park that predated North Shore Community Park: a plot of land between two houses, an unshaded play structure, a small green space, and no bathrooms. KDI was brought in to help upgrade it.
“It was built through an act of goodwill where a corporation comes out [and] puts in a playground on the weekend,” Odbert says. “People said, ‘This isn’t a park for us. This is somebody’s dream of what they wanted to put in our community, and it’s not our park.’”
The North Shore Community Park sits on the northern edge of the neighborhood on previously undeveloped land—there is desert on both sides. KDI partnered with the Desert Recreation District, which manages park and recreation facilities in the valley, to secure the property. Six years after opening, the park, an assemblage of ideas and responses to need, feels cohesive and welcoming. Plantings buffer the relationships between different programmatic areas. A long allée of paloverde trees lines a gravel walkway that forms a spine between the parking lot, playground, and sport areas. The trees are spaced at intervals to accommodate tents and tables from the regular farmers’ market. Fast-growing Indian rosewood trees ring the gathering lawn—they are already tall, with established canopies that shade the grass.
Mounded topography forms a series of hills that provide views of the Salton Sea, and they are planted with agaves, prickly pear cacti, and desert grasses. Boulders serve as intimate benches where local teens can hang out. “These are kind of secret spots,” Odbert says. “Public spaces tend to leave out the middle, like teenagers. We asked them, ‘What’s going to get you to the park?’ They said, ‘Places away from the rest of you.’”
The park, with its variety of spaces and approaches, is a social and cultural diagram, each program reflecting a fine-grain understanding of the community. The goal isn’t a single, universal solution, but a multifaceted, localized response. KDI’s ongoing designs and strategic plans in the ECV run parallel to the discovery of lithium at the Salton Sea. Multinational companies are already eyeing the area for mining and battery manufacturing. New development and infrastructure may be on the horizon, and the change will certainly affect the valley’s more vulnerable residents.
Odbert and Rodriguez Ceja are deeply aware of what is at stake for their collaborators, everything from displacement to pollution. Yet they remain cautiously optimistic. Odbert shared a story from a recent meeting held by more traditional planners who had a cookie-cutter approach to participation. Community members pushed back on a process that threatened to steamroll their involvement. “You ask us to help you make decisions,” she recalls them saying. “And if that’s not what this meeting is about, we’re not here to participate in it.”
Rodriguez Ceja observes that as he’s worked with the residents, “they’ve become designers and planners themselves.” Considering ECV’s history and its uncertain future, KDI’s work isn’t just a master plan or a park design; it’s a tool for empowerment.