By Leonardo Vazquez,
Executive Director, The National Consortium for Creative Placemaking
Preface: PlanSmart NJ, an NCCP partner, is exploring how to reuse vacant suburban office parks and retail centers at its Regional Planning Summit on June 7, 2016. Here are some thoughts on how these spaces can be revitalized through creative placemaking.
Fifty years ago, central cities with industrial spaces were
facing their own challenges with stranded assets. Manufacturers and warehousing companies were
leaving urban centers to move to new suburban spaces around the region (or
elsewhere in the country.)
In some neighborhoods, like downtown Manhattan south of
Houston Street, the spaces weren’t empty for long. Painters and sculptors enjoyed the big
industrial windows that let in a lot of light, the high ceilings, and the open
floor plans. Musicians, dancers and
other performers could practice their craft in buildings that were strong
enough to handle noise and vibrations.
They had the room to live and work in the same space, which were often
affordable because back then most people who weren’t artists didn’t want to
live in or a near an old warehouse. By 1973, that part of downtown Manhattan
became SoHo, and the ‘loft’ spaces that artists pioneered are highly desirable
real estate.
Today’s suburban office parks and vacant retail spaces can
be just as useful to working artists.
Many office park buildings offer spaces with large open floor plans that
can be easily subdivided for individual artists, conference rooms that could be
used for collaborative work, plenty of electrical power and high speed internet
capacity, and room in the lobbies and in outdoor spaces for exhibitions and
performances.
While some suburban office parks around the United States
are getting wholesale conversions into
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| Vacant office building in Colorado. |
Turning suburban office parks into spaces that provide
housing, retail and businesses – essentially creating mini-districts or new
neighborhoods can be relatively expensive and carries enhanced risk. Providing low-cost space – and surplus
furniture and equipment -- to artists, makers, and small entrepreneurs could be
a faster, less expensive and less risky approach to repurposing a property.
In many cities, owners of vacant retail spaces allow artists
and entrepreneurs to create pop-up stores.
The stores may last for a month or a season. Many owners who allow
pop-ups see this as a way to generate some income and interest potential
long-term tenants in the spaces. In some
cases, such as in Chelsea Food Market, some spaces are permanent pop-ups. The vendors change, but the space remains for
temporary uses. (Often these uses are
for clothing, jewelry, artwork, or other commercial uses that do not require
the installation of new equipment or the creation of new interior spaces.
Individual merchants can separate themselves with divider spaces, temporary
walls, or just by spacing themselves apart from one another. This low-cost,
low-risk approach allows a property owner to offer new and different experiences
that can bring back shoppers.
The biggest challenges for owners of suburban stranded
assets are visibility and consumer concept. In busy urban areas, many people
might pass by a building on foot and can be drawn in by clever signage, an
interesting façade, and what they can see through the windows. It takes very
little time for someone to step into a building directly from the street.
Tourists and other visitors tend to be open to the surprise of going into a
converted bank or warehouse.
For the most part, suburban office parks and suburban
shopping centers are designed for people who already know they want to go
there. A person driving near a
steel-and-glass office park that is set far back from the street is unlikely to
stop there to see ‘what is going on.’
Suburban malls tend to hide their activities from the street behind
solid concrete walls and seas of parking spaces.
To increase visibility, property owners should consider
working with artists to develop highly visible displays of arts – such as
murals, gardens as well as outdoor art exhibits and performances. To help change what consumers and potential
lessees think of suburban office parks and malls, host a wide variety of
events. One event may not quickly change
many minds, but many events can get more people to think more creatively about
these spaces.
The NationalConsortium for Creative Placemaking, based in Union, NJ, works to build
capacity, community and connections for better creative placemaking in the
United States. NCCP partners with PlanSmart on building the field of creative
placemaking in New Jersey.
Image: By Xnatedawgx (Own work) [GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html), CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/) or FAL], via Wikimedia Commons
