Southeastern Community Driven Mobility Roadmap

With funding from the California Air Resources Board, and in collaboration with GRID Alternatives and the Greenlining Institute, Pueblo Studio partnered with four Southeastern San Diego community-based organizations and local residents to co-develop a Community-Driven Mobility Roadmap. Recognizing the long history of planning efforts in Southeastern San Diego—and the community’s repeated calls for mobility investments that reflect their lived realities—the Roadmap was designed to build on past work while centering community ownership and imagination.

With outreach support and guidance from CBO partners, Pueblo Studio facilitated ten participatory workshops and pop-up events. Pueblo Studio used play-based storytelling in everyday community spaces—such as community gardens, schoolyards, and neighborhood events—to invite multigenerational residents to share their transportation experiences and articulate their visions for the future of mobility in their neighborhoods. Through games, creative prompts, and interactive storytelling activities, participants were able to explore what joyful, safe, and reliable transportation could look like and how it could better serve their daily lives. Pueblo Studio then wove these individual stories into a collective narrative that captured community-wide priorities and aspirations, grounding the Roadmap in lived experience rather than abstract planning assumptions.

This narrative-driven, community-led process resulted in tangible shifts in Southeastern San Diego, including $1.5 million invested in lighting and street safety improvements and strengthened relationships between community-based organizations and City staff. The listening sessions and pop-ups also paved the way for San Diego’s first Participatory Budgeting process, through which residents voted to allocate $100,000 toward a Community Beautification pilot project. In the years that followed, community recommendations continued to shape policy, culminating in the launch of a four-year electric, on-demand transportation pilot by the San Diego Association of Governments to improve low-cost access to essential destinations such as grocery stores, hospitals, schools, job centers, and the regional transit network. Through this work, storytelling became a powerful tool for transforming lived experience into concrete planning and policy decisions that reflect the needs and visions of Southeastern communities.