Few moments are more intense than when a first responder arrives on the scene of a crisis. Few first responses are more fraught than those involving behavioral health: crises that feature issues of mental health, substance use, or overdose.

This June at the Aggie Square Launch Space on Stockton Blvd in Sacramento, UC Davis Sociology Lecturer Elizabeth Siggins brought together the full range of working professionals who deal with crisis response to develop new and better ways to do their work by playing a very serious tabletop game.

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. 

How did we get here? What did it take for the Aggie Square team to reach the crucial threshold of breaking ground on the new UC Davis innovation campus in Sacramento? 

There’s a one word answer: teamwork. 

Aggie Square has the potential to substantially expand what we mean by “health” research at UC Davis. An excellent example of how it will do that is the health system’s Digital CoLab, which is looking to carve out a place for itself on an upper floor of Aggie Square’s Lifelong Learning building. 

Looking around the U.S. for examples of innovation campuses to learn from, The Aggie Square team has returned again and again to Philadelphia. There, two research universities — Drexel University and University of Pennsylvania — have joined the venerable, research-focused, nonprofit University City Science Center. Not only that, the partnership extends to a canny business district — University City District — providing us both a model and a warning.

How are innovation districts like Aggie Square responding to our turbulent present moment and what are they contributing to the future of the cities where they are built? Those questions drove discussion at this October’s Association of University Research Parks (AURP) conference, which I attended in Salt Lake City. 

Picture this: You enter Aggie Square’s Community Engagement Hub on the first floor of the tallest building of the project, the front door opening onto a gallery with a long table and walls filled with art from a Quarter at Aggie Square experience. Or maybe the gallery is showing off a citizen science experiment run with a local school; or images taken by a neighborhood photographer who worked with a university collaborator; or possibly paintings by a local artist who is working with a member of our faculty. 

The whole idea of an innovation campus — devoted to catalyzing research that links UC Davis faculty with industry and community partners — depends on space that is better-designed for collaboration than what we have now.

Quarter at Aggie Square is one year old. It is going to grow up fast in the next year, since this fall will be the first opportunity students and faculty have to work together in person on the university’s Sacramento campus. 

After a year of remote instruction on the one hand and global tumult on the other, students and faculty alike are primed to collaborate on new kinds of learning that can help improve the world.