Positive lessons from industrial parks?

Industrial parks have fascinated me for a long time. They are largely an artifact of the 20th century, but with their arrangement of small-to-medium industrial buildings and extensive rail infrastructure, in many ways they were the last expression of 19th century economics, philosophically obsolete from the moment they were built. A visit to the average industrial park today will yield much in the way of warehousing, but almost no true “industries” at all, with most manufacturing having consolidated to exurban domestic super plants or to overseas locations. The rail spurs tend to be empty, or out or service, or in some cases are removed entirely. In many cases, even the warehouses are disappearing, and are now subdivided and re-tennanted with offices, consumer services, and retail. In this light, industrial parks — as the preserves for industry they were intended as — were largely failures.

Or, in reality, have they been stellar successes?

Is the conversion of this structure (in N. W. Portland’s Guilds Lake industrial park) into retail and office a failure of land use, transportation, and economic forecasting… or an unintentional success of a market-driven grandfather of Form-Based Code approaches?

These days, the hottest topic in land use and urban development circles is reuse, or as it is often described, repurposing. The redevelopment of old urban warehouses into lofts and condominiums is a prominent and older example of this trend. The concept is tied very much into notions of sustainable development, the idea that a building will have a life that outlasts any single purpose, thus preserving the energy and materials that went into its making for as long as is practical. Another fairly recent manifestation of the reuse concept is Form-Based Code (FBC). Under FBC, building form is the primary focus of regulation, rather than use. Ideally, a city could be developed entirely with FBC, with little to no restriction on how a building is used over its lifespan. A warehouse could become housing, and then a school, and then a factory, and then a theater, and so forth and so on.

From a repurposing perspective, industrial parks may have be a case of accidental perfection. Here we have large quantities of enclosed space that can be subdivided in any number of ways and repurposed for any number of uses. A showroom for lamps might be next to a paper box manufacturer, and that right next to a specialty foods company, and that right next to a sports clinic, and all of them in inexpensive but durable concrete structures built nearly a generation ago. From a business perspective, the average industrial park may be the embodiment of FBC principles at work, naturally, and purely based on market forces.