From non-place to place in post-suburbia: city-edge office parks as loci for nature-based micro-interventions

Abstract

City-edge office parks are a significant, and under-researched, urban phenomenon. Indeed the transformation of these environments to better address social and environmental sustainability criteria has been described as ‘the big project for this century’. While top-down ‘retrofitting’ is the dominant approach to such transformation, in this paper we highlight the limitations of such an approach and argue for the potential of more bottom-up and creative methods. We report on experiments with office park employees to address the ‘placelessness’ of such environments, aimed at improving ecological sustainability and individuals’ health and wellbeing. We make three significant conclusions: a wealth of hidden ecological and social assets exist to be exploited in such environments; creative methods to envision more sustainable futures have a great deal of potential to break existing path dependencies; and, respecting participation constraints among employee-participants is vital for future research and action.

Keywords:

• urban futures
• city-edge
• office parks
• creative interventions
• sustainability

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 There has been some debate about appropriate terminology to describe suburban/edge-city development in the European context. Bontje and Burdack (2005) argue against the use of the edge-city idea in a European context, but note a distinctive city-edge pattern of development of which office parks are one form. In this article, we use the term city-edge when discussing the office park’s location, while also treating this phenomenon as a feature of post-suburban development.

2 Although much ontological debate surrounds the definition of nature and where it begins and ends, we adopt a prosaic, lay definition of nature in the office park drawn from how nature was defined by users in our pilot projects as comprising flora and fauna along with physical aspects of the landscape such as rocks, sky, earth; and less concrete aspects such as fresh outdoor air.

3 The retail hub consisted of a small supermarket, two small cafés and a bakery. These were later additions, a partial retrofitting of the park, to provide a central attraction and meet employee needs.

4 Incredible Edible is a federation of groups aiming to ‘create kind, confident and connected communities through the power of food’. www.incredibleedible.org.uk

5 A long distance cycle route passes along the edge of Coral Park on one of the disused rail lines.