Now that we’ve broken ground, the Aggie Square project has turned a page. 

What comes next? Building the buildings. That’s underway and, honestly, totally thrilling. Fences are up and in the coming months the first two structures in the project will begin to take shape. Planning continues too: the Aggie Square team is meeting with future tenants to assess equipment needs and fine-tune the interior design to ensure the project’s labs, classrooms, and community engagement spaces all deliver on their promise. 

Beyond these more or less self-evident next steps after groundbreaking, Aggie Square team members are identifying new challenges and opportunities ahead. 

We passed out Post-Its at a recent team meeting and everyone in our collaborative group of academics and project managers, developers and domain experts wrote down what they were anticipating in the months ahead. I reference those comments throughout this column. 

Potential for community

Maybe because Aggie Square is helping us all think differently about what UC Davis means to the neighborhoods that surround it, many of the goals called out by team members focused on community. It is a good thing that we are in the process of hiring our first Aggie Square community engagement manager, since according to the list of goals our team identified, this person will have a lot to work on.

“Welcoming the community into Aggie Square” is a goal that cannot wait until doors open, and two other related goals identified by team members give us assignments right now. The goal of helping “neighbors realize Aggie Square is a good thing” is behind a series of community forums with our partners in the city of Sacramento government, including a May meeting to be run by area youth leaders. “Community supports Aggie Square because they understand the potential'' is a goal that drives our communications, as we make every effort to be clear about how the project will benefit the region as a whole. 

Part of showing the project’s potential means “being able to answer what jobs will be in Aggie Square,“ as one team member put it. We make quick progress on this as construction begins, but hard hat jobs are hardly the end of the story. Our workforce development efforts treat Aggie Square as a portal to jobs across the university. And, further, we expect our industry tenants to bring with them jobs in Aggie Square and beyond. “Advancing our workforce development goals related to local and diverse talent” is a comprehensive goal, in short, and a central feature of the university’s broader anchor institution mission. 

Academic mission

Connecting that anchor mission to the UC Davis academic mission touches on a whole series of Aggie Square activities. A goal like “treatment of the first patient with therapy developed at Aggie Square” helps show how our university’s world-class research betters our neighbors’  lives. The goal of “developing a new signature cross-causeway research collaboration” expresses how Aggie Square will link the two UC Davis campuses – our college town campus in Davis and our urban campus in Sacramento. 

As well, the goal of “welcoming the first living-learning cohort to Aggie Square housing” addresses an equally ambitious aim of bringing UC Davis undergraduate education to Sacramento. Residential Quarter at Aggie Square programs for undergrads represent another way to link our academic mission to the anchor mission of making our region an even better place to live. 

Industry and innovation

And an even better place to work: “Becoming a destination for new companies to find their way to Sacramento” has been a goal for Aggie Square since our chancellor’s earliest direction to bring industry tenants into the project. Both the UC Davis team and our developer partners Wexford Science + Technology are focused on “bringing our industry relationships to fruition.” Stay tuned. 

What’s involved in that process of industry recruitment is, first, signing contracts with the kinds of corporate tenants that will collaborate with our university researchers and, second, “filling space in Aggie Square with serious entrepreneurs.” We predict that the innovation infrastructure at Aggie Square will not only accelerate entrepreneurship within UC Davis but also afford new possibilities for economic development in the greater Sacramento area. 

 ‘Going vertical’

Among other goals, “seeing construction go vertical” captures our excitement at Aggie Square becoming real, while “secure trailer permit” captures the hard work involved in Aggie Square becoming real. There will be permits, inspections, value engineering sessions, and a whole series of meetings on Zoom and in-person consultations to keep the construction phase of the project going. This work is important and all the people involved in securing the trailer permit (for example) are heroes. They will know it is worth it when they experience “seeing the first floor construction,” a more modest goal, perhaps, but the key next step to achieve verticality. 

Aggie Square is an exercise in place-making, and the details of the construction will have everything to do with the kind of place it becomes. A lot of the design work so far has hinged on questions about how to make the buildings welcoming to the diverse groups who will work, learn and meet here. That’s why a goal like “working with local artists to create a one of a kind lobby experience” is so vital. We are designing new front doors and entryways to the university. They better be awesome. 

We’ll keep posting renderings on our website so that you can keep up as we continue the multifaceted work of “creating a sense of place.”