Sprawl Nation

SN: if you’ve seen just a smattering of my past Tumblr posts, you probably guessed that I’m a passionate believer in adaptive reuse - urban, suburban or rural - as a means to reduce blight and encourage economic development, with an eye on sustainability. I especially enjoy highlighting those in my home state of Michigan. 

Having attended college a few miles from the next building, a power plant in its former life, I had often imagined the ways the plant could serve a future purpose. I’m excited that reality has met imagination. And while a corporate headquarters might not sound wildly creative, the employees are bound to feel more inspired by their unique surroundings than spending 40 hours a week in a cookie cutter industrial park.

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As a heads up, the linked article may now be behind a paywall.
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The former Lansing Board of Water & Light plant sat mostly empty and unused for 15 years until Accident Fund, a Lansing, Michigan based insurance company, spent $182 million turning the plant into its headquarters. 
Ford Motor’s monumental challenge of restoring Detroit’s decrepit Michigan Central Station to its former glory has parallels to Accident Fund Insurance Co.’s conversion of a shuttered 1930s coal power plant in Lansing into its national headquarters. 


Decommissioned in 1992, the former Lansing Board of Water & Light plant sat mostly empty and unused for 15 years, blighting downtown Lansing’s riverfront in the same way Detroit’s long-vacant train station has been an eyesore on the Motor City’s skyline and psyche for the past three decades. 
Like Detroit’s once-storied train station, Lansing’s old Ottawa Street power plant had been largely stripped of precious metals and fixtures by vandals and the building had suffered from years of neglect. 


Accident Fund leaders saw an opportunity to repurpose a skyline-defining building that seemed more likely to meet a wrecking ball than house an insurance company. 
When converting the old coal power plant to the AF office headquarters, engineers and construction companies worked to preserve the building’s Art Deco doors and features. They kept many of the plant’s structural features, such as the crane that was used to move coal and equipment around the hulking power plant.


SN: with some newfound free time, I’m adding a new research project for SprawlNation; provide active sprawl reduction examples from around the country (USA) that other communities can draw inspiration from. Most notably, private and public collaborations based on environmental protection, green space development/preservation, urban infill, sustainability, and historic preservation or adaptive reuse of vacated/aging buildings. For the third installment, from the State of New York, I present the Open Space Institute:

OSI has protected 140,713 acres of land in New York State, where our work first began more than forty years ago, and other important properties in Maine, Virginia, South Carolina and New Jersey. Through direct acquisition and conservation easements, we protect critical open space habitats, recreation areas, family farms, historic sites, and partner with local and state government to expand their parklands.

Recently, the group purchased more than 4,000 acres of forest in the southern Adirondack foothills to protect a city watershed and provide recreational opportunities.

The Open Space Institute says the land acquisition in the Saratoga County towns of Edinburg and Providence will permanently protect the watershed for the city of Amsterdam.

The group bought the 4,388-acre tract known as the “Hans Creek” property for $2.55 million. It’s a broad, forested plateau overlooking the southern shore of Great Sacandaga Lake.

The property has a forest road network that will be the foundation of an extensive trail system for hiking and snowmobiling.

The Open Space Institute says it plans to transfer the property to a private buyer under a conservation easement that allows timber harvest and public recreation and prohibits development.

SN: after yesterday’s post about Dallas’ uneasy adoption of new urbanism ideals comes the following pessimistic look at the state of current planning via The Texas Tribune:

Texas cities want millennials living downtown. So why does the state keep building highways to the suburbs?

While millennials may be pushing away old ideas about what transportation infrastructure — and the development patterns it creates — should look like, the Council of Governments’ (one of many metropolitan planning groups around the country that the federal government has tasked with overseeing transportation planning in urban area) proposed $135 billion plan for North Texas’ future looks decidedly old school:

About 58 percent of the $89.4 billion earmarked for capital projects is for new pavement — everything from highways and tolled lanes to city streets.

About 15 percent of the $38.2 billion for major highway construction is budgeted for building freeways and corridor extensions that don’t yet exist.

Less than 3 percent of the $42.9 billion in traditional federal and state transportation money in the plan goes toward projects built for pedestrians and bicyclists; less than 1 percent goes toward public transit.

And while there’s $33.3 billion earmarked for public transit construction and improvements, nearly two-thirds of that money is from revenue streams that do not exist yet.

“It’s a vicious cycle that’s going on here,” said Dallas City Councilman Scott Griggs. “It’s transportation planning right out of the 1950s.”

One of the most crucial contributors to what has become a self-fulfilling highway-building bureaucracy can be found at the beginning of the planning process itself: forecasting future transportation demand. “We look at 2045, but we use today’s travel behavior and reasons for traveling as staying constant. I don’t think that will be the case, but we have no way of understanding what travel demand will be like in 2045, so we do the best we can.”

SN: “Anyone who wants to argue with the future doesn’t have one”. The statement below, harsh as it may sound, rings true beyond the DFW metro area; adapt to resident/workforce demands for walkable communities or find yourself a relic of the expressway past. The recent circus surrounding the hunt for Amazon HQ2 placed an exclamation point on such sentiments by elevating transit and livability, alongside tax incentives, as determining factors for finalists.

‘In the core of Dallas, a city designed for commuters must be overhauled for residents. The central business district concept is a relic of the past. Millennials and baby boomers—the two largest generations in American history—demand walkability. The downtown Dallas area will be the largest of many urban mixed-use centers in the region. Its success will have a spillover effect on the poorer neighborhoods to its east, west, and south. If managed thoughtfully, it will channel the tide to lift all boats.

SN: adaptive reuse richly photographed for a new book ‘Ponce City Market: The Rise, Fall, and Rebirth of Atlanta’s Largest Building’. Artist profile courtesy of The Oxford American; lead photo from Curbed Atlanta.

SN: with some newfound free time, I’m adding a new research project for SprawlNation; provide active sprawl reduction examples from around the country (USA) that other communities can draw inspiration from. Most notably, private and public collaborations based on environmental protection, green space development/preservation, urban infill, sustainability, and historic preservation or adaptive reuse of vacated/aging buildings. For the second installment, from the Cuyahoga County Planning Commission in Northeast Ohio, I present Cuyahoga Greenways:

The greenway system will provide recreation opportunities and alternative transportation options for moving around the county, on foot and by bike, and improving communitynhealth, well-being, and economic vitality.

As a tool for improving transportation, the Cuyahoga Greenways system will provide more than just new links between the communities of Northeast Ohio. The Cuyahoga Greenways plan aims to develop an equitable transportation strategy that benefits all ages, abilities, and users. Whether walking the dog, pushing a stroller, or commuting to work, the Cuyahoga Greenways network is logical, well-connected, and accessible, providing unique experiences and a variety of benefits to the region.

These benefits stretch beyond transportation to include; increasing quality of life by encouraging healthier lifestyles, boosting property values, positively impacting the local economy, improving storm water capture, and reducing carbon emissions. Cuyahoga Greenways can help shift the thinking about transportation countywide for a healthier and more sustainable future by highlighting the benefits of Greenways while also supporting communities with more accessible, affordable, and better connected multi-modal transportation options.

Funded by the Northeast Ohio Areawide Coordinating Agency (NOACA) through their Transportation for Livable Communities Initiative (TLCI), this active transportation project includes outreach and coordination with multiple organizations, municipalities, and the public to develop this robust greenway network. The project team is preparing this network of candidate routes connecting existing trails, parks, and points of interest throughout every community in Cuyahoga County. As part of this preliminary step, the project team prepared a series of maps showing natural land cover, existing and proposed bicycle lanes, and points of interest.

http://www.countyplanning.us/projects/cuyahoga-greenways

SN: the author of the following coins the term ‘urban absorption’ to describe urban renewal and and blight reduction when orchestrated by grassroots, citizen driven initiatives. The approach is simple in its earnestness. In a nutshell, don’t let vacant and/or blighted land remain without a purpose. Urban agriculture, parks, light industry, or even, counterintuitive to many new urbanism principles, parking lots, are more ideal than the cost of blight in real dollars and on the psyches of residents and visitors.   (via Turning Around Urban Decline)

What’s the best way for cities to deal with vacant and abandoned properties, which drag down neighborhood values and create a vicious cycle of poverty and deterioration?

The usual answer for struggling cities is to bring in new jobs, grow the tax base, and gentrify poorer neighborhoods. The problem with that approach is that the poor people in those neighborhoods are inevitably pushed out, move somewhere else, and the cycle begins anew, said Justin Hollander, an associate professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts University.

Cities “should have a diversity of types neighborhoods—but even in the poorest of poor neighborhoods, there is no need for there to be vacant lots and abandoned buildings,” said  Hollander. He has previously done urban planning research in New Bedford, a small waterfront city in southeastern Massachusetts, and knows it takes a different approach to dealing with vacant and abandoned properties. In his latest book, An Ordinary City (Palgrave Macmillan), he explores in depth New Bedford’s approach, which he calls urban absorption.

Property owners there bought up distressed neighboring properties, and reused them for everything from parking to urban gardens. The result was a turnaround. “It was not blight anymore—no drug dealers are going to set up shop and do their thing,” Hollander said.

What was behind that transformation? “I wasn’t able to point to any specific city policy or initiative that said that we’re going to put this land back into reuse—it was really the decisions of thousands of individual landowners and investors,” he said. “The market was working; this land is valuable, people are reusing and repurposing it, taking a dense city and making it less dense.”

Zoning regulations in many ways “are a big inhibitor of this kind of reabsorption,” in part because those rules are often counterproductive and difficult to change. In many residential neighborhoods, for instance, agricultural land use is forbidden. But if you have a large vacant lot, growing food in an urban farm makes far more sense than leaving a property unused. The cities, he said, can be active partners with property owners and neighborhood association to rescue abandoned properties.

SN: with some newfound free time, I’m adding a new research project for SprawlNation; provide active sprawl reduction examples from around the country (USA) that other communities can draw inspiration from. Most notably, private and public collaborations based on environmental protection, green space development/preservation, urban infill, sustainability, and historic preservation or adaptive reuse of vacated/aging buildings. First up, from The Santa Clara Valley in California, I present The Open Space Authority:

URBAN GRANT PROGRAMS The Open Space Authority helps connect people to the outdoors in their own neighborhoods through nearby parks, trails, urban community gardens, and environmental education programs. The Authority has three active grant programs that provide funds for urban projects:

- Measure Q Urban Open Space - Measure Q Environmental Education - 20% Funding

In November 2014, the voters approved Measure Q, a funding measure that generates approximately $7.9 million per year for open space protection in the cities of Campbell, Milpitas, Morgan Hill, San Jose, Santa Clara and unincorporated areas of the County. Up to 25% of this amount can be allocated annually to the Measure Q Urban Open Space and Environmental Education grant programs.

SN: not the sexiest development projects, but Buffalo continues to have all the right ingredients for a sustained revival - infill vs sprawling growth, mixed-use development, inclusive/mixed income housing, and at least one project utilizing green technologies (geothermal HVAC). I particularly liked the NY LT Governor’s quite excerpted below. Click through to the article for the details on the 11 projects.

Better Buffalo Fund provides $7.7 million for 11 city projects

The Better Buffalo Fund will give $7.7 million worth of financial support to 11 projects aimed at revitalizing neighborhoods within the City of Buffalo.

The fund, part of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Buffalo Billion program, supports housing, retail and business projects near public transportation. Lt. Gov. Kathy Hochul on Friday announced the third round of award recipients.

SN: 😀 I’m old and use emojis sparingly! Further proof you don’t need to tear down the core to revitalize an urban area.

The redevelopment of Chicago’s Old Main Post Office took a major step forward as global healthcare firm Walgreens announced a plan to move 1,800 employees to the long-vacant Art Deco structure at 433 W. Van Buren Street.

SN: ‘The High Line effect’ expands further. The Manhattan landmark continues to reverberate across the US and worldwide as more and more diverse cities look to the inclusive design as a benchmark to invite residents to interact with often forgotten and underutilized sections of their downtowns.

The San Pedro Creek has served many purposes and people over its lifespan, most recently, it has been lined with concrete and used as a drainage ditch. As Alyssa Giacobbe explains for Architectural Digest, that latest incarnation of the creek has turned the space into metaphor. Locals came to see it as a barrier — both physical and metaphorical — between the west side and downtown, which separates the majority of the city’s white and Latino residents.That’s why some 25 years ago, activist and designer Henry R. Muñoz III began thinking up a way to reclaim the creek.

“We became very interested in telling the story of a drainage ditch that divided the city while turning it into a place of unity through architecture, urban design, and artistic expression,” he tells Giacobbe.

Now the first phase of the project, called the San Pedro Culture Park, has opened. It debuted May 5, in time for the city’s 300th anniversary, Huddleston reported in another article for the Express-News. The first phase includes walkways on both sides of the creek, 38 benches, 26 pieces of art and historical texts, limestone walls, murals and landscaping.

Nan Palmero/Flickr

SN: it could be my advancing age and encroaching nostalgia, or a latent neediness I can never escape, that inspires with such joy to read about a town in Nova Scotia whose rebirth after an industrial decline is its library. Also, pertinent to this Tumblr, a perfect example of adaptive reuse and old fashioned placemaking (it is a library after all, full of books, during the continued rise of all things digital).

Small town’s core begins a new chapter - adaptive reuse of a historical college building reclaims a city center as a modern library

The town of Truro, population 12,000, lies about 100 kilometres north of Halifax almost exactly in the middle of the province. Starting in 1875, Truro boomed with the railroad and factories before the First World War, when trades were still an art. Since then, Truro has suffered the same plight as many other North American towns and cities: a mass exodus of shops and services to power centres on the perimeter. But in this Nova Scotia town, where the Bay of Fundy ebbs and flows and family farms still prosper in the nearby countryside, the tide has turned on the trend that is emptying downtown cores of their vibrancy.

It took the reimagining of one derelict 19th-century building – or in architectural speak, the “adaptive reuse” of it – in the heart of the downtown to kick-start a revival.

Once a liability with boarded-up windows, a leaky roof and a demolition date, the revitalized Normal College is now the lifeblood of the town, as a cutting-edge new library surrounded by a buzzing public square.

It was during prosperous time when the town’s stateliest building, the Normal College, was built in 1877 as Nova Scotia’s teacher training school. But it fell on hard times, and in the early 1960s the building was haphazardly converted into a YMCA, and later, a boxing club. Except for its roosting pigeons, it had been vacant for years when the town of Truro began in 2014 to hunt for a site for a new library.

The project designers, international-award-winning Halifax-based MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple Architects, wanted to preserve the old Normal College for its cultural value.

”There’s a civic precinct in this town and if you start taking some of those civic things out of there and demolishing, all of a sudden you’re left with a very nondescript kind of place. All of a sudden, it fizzles out and dies,” says principal Talbot Sweetapple.

Architects use the term “adaptive reuse” to describe the repurposing of an old building for something other than it was built for, with a focus on sustainable design, reducing urban sprawl and preserving heritage buildings.

As a library, the Second Empire-style Normal College still has the same classic, grand centre entrance with 18-foot ceilings and light flooding through keystone arches, but also a modern box-like addition to blend new with old.

MacKay-Lyons Sweetapple ensured the library’s addition had plenty of windows to not only give the space an airy feel but also views of the refurbished main building. Since the $7.8-million library opened in late 2016, more people and new businesses have flooded to the downtown.

Library membership has since doubled. The historic civic square in front of the Normal College was also restored, attracting crowds for concerts and skaters in the wintertime when it transforms into an outdoor rink. The square earned the No. 2 spot on Great Places in Canada’s 2017 list of best-loved public spaces.

”There’s a new vibrancy downtown,” says Truro Mayor Bill Mills. He points to events now held in the civic square and independent new businesses that have opened up in the downtown core, such as a bicycle store, a gourmet burger joint and a hand-printed apparel shop. “Now we have a lot of young entrepreneurs who are coming up with magnificent ideas and they’re the ones who are really driving the downtown now.”

”You’ve got to revitalize and strengthen the heart of the downtown. If you move these institutions out of town and put them on the highway or out of the downtown, everything gets kind of weakened,” says Mr. Sweetapple. “If they can learn a few lessons about reinvesting into their downtown cores and making sure they don’t die a slow death, it’s really important.”

”It has an elegance to it that speaks to a different time,” Mr. Mills says about the three-storey brick building with a mansard roof. “It’s important for us to know where we came from, to help us know where we should go.”

SN: a recent post about similar proposed construction in the Toronto, Ontario metropolitan area discussed the ‘city within a city’ concept - True mixed used space for living, working, and providing destination attractions, including ample green space - as a mechanism to reclaim underutilized space in fast growing urban areas. The added bonus in the architects’ plan is the use of “carbon positive towers constructed from renewable materials that promote a healthy microclimate and sustainable lifestyle”. Could we see similar developments inside the US in the near future? Perhaps a tech heavy city with housing and mixed use challenges such as San Francisco or Seattle? Perhaps the recent reemergence of rust belt towns such as Detroit or Pittsburgh could present intriguing destinations for urban planners and architects alike. Find the right combination of high housing demand, transit strains, and visionary city leaders, and the next SprawlNation post could feature an American entry. Please share if you are aware of such an existing or planned project.

This sustainable district in Sweden features carbon-positive towers

Located between the commercial center of Sickla köpkvarter and the district of Hammarby Sjöstad, Nacka Port is ripe for redevelopment with its turn-of-the-century industrial buildings and backdrop of greenery. Furthermore, the site is located at the intersection of two main traffic routes. The architects designed the new urban block, named “Klinten,” as a “city within a city”.

Two proposed towers feature terraced levels that step down to a shared podium and anchor the site and will have communal and private terraces dressed in greenery. In addition to residences, the mixed-use development includes a market, restaurants, a bike-cafe, coworking spaces, a hotel and gym, artist studios, workshops and other communal facilities. “The block is designed to generate local urban life, where one feels at home with the freedom to take personal initiatives, where residents are encouraged to use the outdoor environment for co-creation or just meet and socialize. The core of the Nacka Port concept focuses on creating a positive vision of the future needs of both humans and our planet,” the architects said.