ULI Wrap-Up: Post-Industrial Redevelopment and the Mega-Region
Professor Paul Hardin Kapp
Among the over 70 sessions offered at the Urban Land Institute’s Annual Fall Conference in Los Angeles last week was a lecture addressing strategies for sustainable post-industrial cities. Paul Armstrong, Associate Professor of Architecture and Paul Hardin Kapp, Associate Professor of Historic Preservation, both at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, led the discussion on the strong opportunities that post-industrial markets across the country offer as platforms for sustainability. The following offers highlights and key takeaways from their session, “Post-Industrial Redevelopment and the Mega-Region: New Strategies for the Sustainable City in the 21st Century.”
The Professors set the stage by addressing the decline of manufacturing in cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh, Milwaukee and Minneapolis and discussed the negative impacts associated with the loss of jobs and declining populations in these areas. With this decline in downtown centers over the past fifty years, they identified opportunities for a sustainable recovery in these markets.
Ripe for redevelopment, markets like Milwaukee, Minneapolis and St. Louis were highlighted as cities where smart growth has begun to take hold. These post-industrial markets across the upper Midwest and Northeast corridor contain many key ingredients to create a revitalized and vibrant community. Offering an array of attractive amenities including historic downtowns and main streets, cultural and higher education institutions, affordability, walkability, public transit systems with capacity as well as underused infrastructure and abundant potable water. Developers are beginning to discover ways to bring new projects and fresh capital to these markets, increasing the city’s “urban metabolism” – the economic energy produced by people putting together goods and activity in a city.
Utilizing the redevelopment of areas within downtown Milwaukee and Minneapolis as case studies, the Professors highlighted that rivers and waterfront areas - originally valued and utilized in an industrial way - are now areas of a city that are being redeveloped for residential use, with significant value attributed to these natural amenities. Following the trend of “ecological urbanism,” these markets are capitalizing on ways to achieve their sustainable objectives through incorporating nature and connectivity.
Strategies for maximizing a developer’s ROI on in these markets were also addressed. The Professor encouraged the use of TIFs (tax-increment financing) as well as historic preservation credits as ways to drive returns on a project and make the redevelopment financially feasible. They highlighted how there are so many unused or underused buildings in these post-industrial markets and that these structures were built to last, and therefore could be successfully retrofitted and repurposed, further reducing a developer’s project cost.
From a macro perspective, this large swath of post-industrial cities comprise a region that could offer significant upside if it were more strongly linked to the other cities within the region. The Professors posited that by developing a high-speed rail system that would link cities like Chicago to Minneapolis, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis and Indianapolis, the results would be powerful. They believe that the enhanced connectivity would spur job growth, increase revenues, revitalize industry and reduce the amount of creative capital leaving the Midwest for the East and West coasts. As a reference point, they spoke of the revitalization of Lille, France, a post-industrial city that is now flourishing through its high-speed connections to Paris, London and Brussels. The redeveloped transit helped create a mega-region designated by nodes of activity and brought strong economic growth and new industry to Lille.
Through increased connectivity, revitalized downtown developments and enhanced “urban metabolism,” the Professors strongly believe that the post-industrial cities of today are ripe for redevelopment and will lead the way as sustainable cities in the future.