Miami planning firm drafts “Florida Sprawl Repair Act”

Mall retrofits top priority

Wendy Natt, May 06, 09.

Miami design and planning firm Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. (DPZ) recently provided officials at the Florida Division of Community Assistance with suggested legislation for turning dying shopping centers into complete, transit-connected town centers, according to a PlaceMakers article. They titled the draft the “State of Florida Sprawl Repair Act” (pdf), which intends to, among other things, enable “the retrofit of shopping malls and shopping centers into dense, walkable, mixed-use town centers.”

The document aims to incentivize private sector investment in this kind of redevelopment by making the process of permitting and obtaining infrastructure funding easier, according to DPZ principal Galina Tachieva. She says that the repair, retrofit, and repurposing of malls and shopping centers should be the first focus of “sprawl interventions” in the suburbs of Florida as well as other states.

Tachieva notes that “these commercial nodes command the largest monetary and real estate investments in suburbia,” and that if dead or dying shopping centers are redeveloped into complete, walkable, high-density town centers, then “transit between these intensified nodes will then start making sense.”

(Photo credit: ChicagoEye)