Reparative Ecologies of Return: Rewilding the El Segundo Gateway | The Plan Journal

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Subscribers only
Type 
Article
Authors 
Maryam Eskandari
ABSTRACT -

What if urban nature were not a matter of adding greenery, but a practice of repairing ecologies suppressed by urbanization? The El Segundo Gateway advances this reframing through a project that evolved from a modest 0.22-mile [353.57 m] corridor into a 10.8-acre [4.37 ha.] leftover landscape, commissioned by the City of El Segundo as a streetscape, civic threshold, and hydrological infrastructure. Located between the Chevron Refinery and LAX, the site overlays a former wetland and Tongva seasonal trail fragmented by extractive industry and impermeable surfaces. The project advances an ecology of return, positioning landscape as multispecies infrastructure and cultural memory. A circular pavilion draws on Tongva kish architecture, using a tensile woven structure to buffer sound, heat, and vibration while supporting habitat for the endangered El Segundo blue butterfly and its host plant, seacliff buckwheat (Eriogonum parvifolium). Grounded in regenerative urbanism, Indigenous and Black ecologies, and nature-based infrastructure theory, the Gateway repositions infrastructure as a cultural and ecological instrument of repair. Whose nature is restored? In El Segundo, repair becomes a layered return to species, land, and memory. 

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