Mira Costa Community College is located in Northern San Diego County and covers 180 acres that serves over 20,000 students. With the emergence of increased environmental awareness and the pending green technology boom, the College is trying to position themselves as a leader in environmental vocational education. In an effort to forward Mira Costa’s strong commitment to the environment, they commissioned a Landscape and Facilities Master Plan to be grounded in environmentally sensitive practices. The primary goal of this Master Plan is to establish an open space network that functions as a complex and multi-layered system to enhance connectivity, strengthen programmatic relationships, and improve the overall environmental health of the campus and surrounding community.
Another key goal of the Landscape Master Plan is to enhance environmental educational opportunities by creating a landscape framework that facilitates stronger physical and programmatic connections throughout campus. This strategy will create spaces that encourage classroom instruction to extend beyond the confines of classroom walls. A new way of teaching and learning can emerge where students are able to see the interrelationships between geology, horticulture, biology, and physics within a living environmental research laboratory. Understanding these interrelationships will equip students with a stronger analytic foundation that helps them succeed in their future careers. The outdoor classroom also has the ability to open up environmental education to the surrounding community through weekend workshops and lectures. Public workshops will teach the community about productive habitats and the local species that they support. This public interface will allow for an emergence of shared ideals based on the local environment, where a broad cross-section of the community can gather to explore, learn, and share ideas with one another.