Retrofitting business suburbia: competition, transformation, and challenges in metropolitan Boston’s suburban office parks

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the retrofitting and redevelopment of suburban office parks, and in particular, the planning, design, and policy issues and challenges associated with this redevelopment. Recent literature indicates a shift of suburban business development in favor of increasingly competitive central cities, a dilemma for planners charged with revitalizing aging suburban business parks. To understand the nature and causality of suburban office park retrofitting and redevelopment, we conducted 13 qualitative, semi-structured interviews with planners, developers, and officials in the inner Boston metropolitan region. Interviews indicated increasing obsolescence, with widespread redevelopment as a coping strategy. Strategies included densification, mixed uses, enhanced public spaces, and attempts to enhance transit. We examine two case studies: Northwest Park in Burlington, MA, and Needham Crossing, in Needham, MA: both are former office parks redeveloped as mixed-use developments. Our research clarifies the nature and types of physical redevelopment, as well as the specific motivations behind redevelopment as a planning strategy for enhancing the viability of aging suburban office developments.

KEYWORDS:

• Business suburbia
• office parks
• retrofitting suburbia
• redevelopment
• suburban revitalization
• Boston metropolitan region

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Beside the dominance of the central city of Boston, the Boston region has historically been characterized by many small villages, some of which developed in the nineteenth century as small industrial cities independent of the central city. Boston’s polycentrism thus has a long history.

2. Between the 1960s and 1980s suburban Boston had a cluster of technology companies located along I95/Route 128 with small tech firms, world class universities and venture capital that was competitive to California’s Silicon Valley. Ultimately Boston’s Route 128 did not remain competitive with California. Saxenian (1996) suggests that Silicon Valley developed a decentralized but cooperative system while I95/Route 128 was dominated by independent and self-sufficient corporations.

3. Focus Area: towns and cities in suburban locations of Boston along major traffic infastructure.

4. The analyzed documents included the MetroFuture Regional Plan, Newton-Needham Innovation District and several data maps for the Boston region, generated and analyzed via the Metro Boston Data Common (www.metroboston.datacommon.org).

5. Millennials are the demographic cohort following Generation X. Demographers and researchers typically use the early 1980s as starting birth years and ending birth years ranging from the mid-1990s to early 2000s.

6. The Comprehensive Permit Act is a Massachusetts law, which allows developers of affordable housing to override certain aspects of municipal zoning bylaws and other requirements. It consists of Massachusetts General Laws Chapter 40B. Chapter 40B was enacted in 1969 to address the shortage of affordable housing statewide by reducing barriers created by local municipal building permit approval processes, local zoning, and other restrictions.

7. The MassWorks Infrastructure Program provides an opportunity for municipalities and other eligible entities in the state of Massachusetts seeking public infrastructure funding to support economic development and job creation. (http://www.mass.gov/hed/economic/eohed/pro/infrastructure/massworks/faq/).

8. Information in this case study was provided by interviewees from the town of Burlington and the Nordblom Company.

9. Information in this case study was provided by interviewees from the town of Needham and from the Cabot, Cabot, and Forbes Company.

10. Beside office parks, also dead Mall sites as another type of nonresidential suburbia, have gained growing attention in US Cities during the last years (Dunham-Jones and Williamson 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hendrik Jansen

Hendrik Jansen is a doctoral candidate at TU Dortmund University’s Department of Urban Development and a research associate at ILS-Research Institute for Regional and Urban Development, both of which are located in Dortmund, Germany. He is founder and partner of the urban design office BJP | Bläser Jansen Partner in Dortmund. His research interest focuses on retrofitting suburban business parks, urban design & policy, and transnational comparison.

Brent D. Ryan

Brent D. Ryan is the head of Department of Urban Studies and Planning’s City Design and Development Group and an associate professor of urban design and public policy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where his research focuses on international development, sustainability, theory of urbanism and urban design.