Where houses replace warehouses: managing residential and mixed use redevelopment of deindustrialized urban areas
Date
2017
Authors
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Journal ISSN
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
As many American cities have experienced significant population growth since
the 1980s, their industrial areas often become the target of redevelopment pressure to
meet rising demand for urban housing. This pressure comes from developers seeking
to convert properties to higher rent land uses such as residential and mixed use, and
municipal governments seeking to put vacant or underused properties into more active
uses. Philadelphia’s West Washington Avenue is a legacy industrial area that has
begun to experience this pressure over the last five years. In other former urban
industrial areas that have undergone this pressure, municipal governments managed
this process in many different ways, including regulating private developers, forming
public-private partnerships, and initiating urban design programs. These management
strategies have served to advance a variety of stakeholder land use planning goals. ☐ The built fabric of these legacy industrial areas offers a distinctive urban
landscape grounded in its heritage as a place of industrial enterprise and labor. While
many of these areas began as center for heavy industrial land uses such as foundries or
coal yards, their contemporary built fabric conveys layers of industrial development.
As city planning departments seek to manage the reinvestment and redevelopment
activity that has appeared in these legacy industrial areas, the outcomes of their
management strategies transform the area’s layout, functions, users and, in turn, its
distinct landscape. ☐ This thesis argues that municipalities’ tactics for managing residential
redevelopment in their legacy industrial areas will advance particular planning goals
and bolster particular land uses, consequently altering the area’s built environment and
physical heritage through selective restoration and new construction. Cities manage
residential and mixed use redevelopment pressure on their legacy industrial areas at
varying levels of permissibility and to diverse, sometimes disparate, economic, social
and political ends. However, these management strategies share the fact that they alter
the character of the area’s streets, sidewalks, and buildings. West Washington Avenue
is analyzed to formulate recommendations for management tactics that consider not
only stakeholder goals but also the physical and spatial impacts on a distinct urban
landscape.