Federal Realty’s Assembly Row development near Boston includes the Class A office building 450 Artisan Way (shown here).
A
dd one pa rt office, one part retail, and one part residential. Integrate smoothly in a dense, well-located inner-ring suburb with transit access, and stir. This recipe for successful mixed-use developments is also a blueprint for smart growth in today’s innovation economy. The close proximity of companies to each other, to residences and to retail brings people and ideas together, creating connected communities that drive invention and collaboration—all of which a city needs to build muscle in a post-recession world. Bruce Katz, coauthor of The Metropolitan Revolution, notes, “Every economic era has its own spatial geography of innovation.” Today, the most inventive developers are creating a geography of mixed-use projects that provide not only a symbiosis of live/work/play, but also create a sense of place. Far from sterile lifestyle centers, these new developments are living, breathing neighborhoods, and the developers who make them are essentially urban planners. Two leaders envisioning the new era of mixed-use properties are PCI Developments (PCI) and Federal Realty Investment Trust. These two North American developers have impressive mixed-use development resumes.
knowledge-leader.com
COLLIERS INTERNATIONAL summer 2014
|
27