“How Can We Urbanize Where We Are?”

Innsbrook in 20 to 40 years?

Innsbrook in 20 to 40 years?

Around the country, local governments are proposing plans to re-develop aging office parks as urban-style, mixed-use complexes, reports the Wall Street Journal, which cited the Innsbrook office park in Henrico as a case in point.

“Suburban office buildings are passe,” said Burrell Saunders, a principal with Lyall Design and a prime mover behind the re-development of the Pembroke area of Virginia Beach. “We need to have office space integrated into daily life.”

Suburban office parks flourished in the 1980s as corporations moved their facilities closer to where Baby Boomers were living. But many decried them as boring places to work; workers relied upon their automobiles for running errands,going to lunch or attending business meetings. Urban geographer Richard Florida called the office parks “nerdistans.” Now the suburbs are experiencing a reconfiguration as walkable urbanism, even in the absence of mass transit. Innsbrook is a case study of the new thinking. Writes the Journal:

In the Innsbrook area, about 15 miles northwest of Richmond, Va., a plan allowing denser development on office parks met an initial resistance, said R.J. Emmerson, Jr.,, Henrico County planning director. Then the area lost major tenants including Lawyers Title Insurance Company and Circuit City. The need for change became clear, Mr. Emerson said.

Highwood Properties … has received approval to redevelop the first 40 acres of a site that will include 400,000 square feet of retail, 1,000 hotel rooms, some 6,000 apartment and condo units and 3.5 million square feet of office space.

“We’re not going to move our buildings in Innsbrook to the [Richmond central business district]. How can we urbanize where we are?” said Ed Fritsch, president and chief executive officer of Highwoods.

How can we urbanize where we are? We’ll be hearing that question more and more in Richmond, Northern Virginia and, indeed, every metro region across the country. That’s why I maintain that the center of gravity of growth and development is shifting from the periphery back toward the urban core — not necessarily to downtown areas but to existing employment centers. Mixed-use re-development of Innsbrook alone could absorb years and years of population and commercial growth in the Richmond region. And that’s just one candidate for re-development.

(For more info, see my previous post, “Innsbrook: The Future Urban Face of Henrico County.“)

— JAB