Louise A. Mozingo

End office sprawl now

Professor of landscape architecture & environmental planning / University of California, Berkeley, and author, Nov 29, 11.

Tagged with sprawl, sustainability, walkable urbanism

IN an era of concern about climate change, residential suburbs are the focus of a new round of critiques, as low-density developments use more energy, water and other resources. But so far there’s been little discussion of that other archetype of sprawl, the suburban office.

Rethinking sprawl might begin much more effectively with these business enclaves. They cover vast areas and are occupied by a few powerful entities, corporations, which at some point will begin spending their ample reserves to upgrade, expand or replace their facilities.

The bucolic business office is not a state-of-the-art workplace but rather a decades-old model of corporate retreat. In 1942 the AT&T Bell Telephone Laboratories moved from its offices in Lower Manhattan to a new, custom-designed facility on 213 acres outside Summit, N.J.

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Rethinking pastoral capitalism is integral to creating a connected, compact metropolitan landscape that tackles rather than sidesteps a post-peak-oil future. This requires three interrelated strategies. State and federal governments should stop paying for new highway extensions that essentially subsidize the conversion of agricultural land for development, including corporate offices. Existing infrastructure needs maintenance and renewal, not expansion.

Suburban jurisdictions that now require little of the next corporate campus other than plentiful parking can demand more. For instance, they can use zoning codes to require pedestrian, bicycle and mass-transit links to adjacent residential developments. Add to the mix new public spaces, a greater diversity of uses, and transit between multiple employment centers and residential districts — not only to and from the downtown — and suburban corporate offices could initiate a wave of reform.

While suburban offices will continue to exist, some corporations can re-occupy city centers that they abandoned two generations ago. Development parcels, vacant offices and economic subsidies lie waiting in cities like Cleveland, Hartford, Raleigh, N.C., and Birmingham, Ala. These downtowns are well served by transit and pedestrian connections, a mix of retail and service uses, and a surprising amount of newly built and renovated housing where workers can live.

All three steps — a halt to agricultural land conversion, connecting dispersed employment centers with alternative transit, and encouraging downtown development — are needed to create renewed, civic-minded corporate workplaces and, in the process, move toward sustainable cities. Even leaving aside climate change, very soon the price of energy will make the dispersed, unconnected, low-density city-building pattern impossibly costly. Those jurisdictions and businesses that first create livable, workable, post-peak-oil metropolitan regions are the ones that will win the future.

Full Story: To rethink sprawl, start with offices
Source: New York Times, November 25, 2011

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