The Design of Urban Manufacturing

Robert N. Lane, Nina Rappaport, Robert N. Lane, Nina Rappaport

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429951435
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

American cities are rediscovering the economic and social value of urban manufacturing. However, urban manufacturing is often invisible and poorly understood in terms of urban design, architecture, and policy. The Design of Urban Manufacturing brings a multidisciplinary approach to a new complex reality that urban manufacturing now sits squarely at the intersection of research, education, and neighborhood revitalization. Using cases studies from across North America and beyond, this book presents innovative approaches not only to the design of districts and buildings, but to the design of policy as well: the special roles that governments, local development corporations, and not-for-profit organizations all have to play in supporting manufacturing.

This book presents current models for working neighborhoods where factories enable fine-grained, mixed-use communities and face-to-face contact while creatively solving the very real problems of goods movement and functional buildings. Design guidelines and policy recommendations are calibrated to different types of production districts.

The Design of Urban Manufacturing is the essential resource for policy makers, designers, and students in urban design, planning, and urban and economic development.

Part I

The Design of Districts

The Neighborhood as Factory

1 Urban Design for the Manufacturing District

Robert N. Lane

Landscapes of Urban Production: Loft Districts, Industrial Parks, and Working Neighborhoods

Scenes of urban manufacturing:

From the window of the train as it passes through the edge of the city, a commuter sees imposing loft factories, most of which are gradually being overtaken by nature and graffiti artists. But it looks like some are still being used—not by the original manufacturer, whose majestic rooftop sign is gradually fading away—but by five, six, or seven businesses, each with their own smaller signs in the windows.

From the elevated highway a driver looks across a wide expanse of flat featureless roofs on windowless one-story buildings. The approaching exit—never to be taken by this driver—says “truck route.”

Across the counter of a small shop downtown a customer catches a glimpse of the jeweler working on a lathe in a back room, or catches a whiff of varnish on newly sanded wood furniture.

These places of production in the city are as diverse as the cities themselves. In most people’s minds the only urban manufacturing districts are “loft districts” like SoHo in New York City, symbols of the “postindustrial” city, where striking multistory factories, abandoned by their original owners and subsequently pioneered by artists, are now occupied by well-heeled residents, office workers, and shoppers.

Despite the fact that loft districts are the places that come to mind when people think of urban manufacturing, most industrial real estate in American cities, and almost all of the still-active industrial areas, are more like the low-rise districts our driver saw from the elevated highway—the expanse of single-story “boxes” with open storage and loading areas.

The streets of these “industrial parks,” in contrast to the bustling sidewalks of the loft district, are gritty and eerily quiet, the sidewalk pavement broken up under the weight of the trucks that are parked half on top of them or stacked with pallets of materials obstructing the paths of pedestrians. Cigarette butts around a windowless steel door suggest that there is something happening behind these mute facades, and there is—inside are anywhere from five workers to sixty, making everything from plumbing fittings to electronic components.

At the edge of the industrial park the blocks of one-story windowless factories give way to streets, where workshops and factories of every scale are mixed up with small apartment buildings and townhouses in which people live above workshops or cheek-by-jowl with small factories. Here is the “manufacturing neighborhood,” where the factory is the neighborhood itself—products don’t move so much from floor to floor as from building to building: a metalworker delivers a piece of ornamental hardware to the jewelry maker down the block; two cabinetmakers meet at a nearby coffee shop, and one of them whose business is a bit slow at the moment agrees that some of his workers can help out in the other guy’s shop until he gets through the big order he has just landed.

Figure 1.1 A working loft district, Garment Center, New York City.

Figure 1.2 An active loft district street.

Figure 1.3 A low-rise industrial district, Spring Creek Industrial Park, New York City.

Figure 1.4 Typical street in a low-rise industrial district, Los Angeles.

Figure 1.5 A working neighborhood, Over-the-Rhine, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Figure 1.6 Manufacturing neighborhood street, Dogpatch, San Francisco.

Figure 1.7 A typology of industrial districts: lofts, industrial parks, and neighborhoods.

Manufacturing neighborhoods evolved in the same unselfconscious and unplanned way as the rest of the city. While in some cases these complex patterns have been memorialized in various zoning regimes,¹ in general, these would not be considered designed industrial districts if by that we mean a comprehensive design strategy for new streets, buildings, and public spaces across a large enough area to be considered a district.

There are some examples of designed urban industrial districts built by single manufacturers who required multiple buildings and who had larger land holdings, often next to rail yards or port facilities—places like Porta Genoa in Milan, Industry City in Brooklyn (see Kimball, p. 235), and the Pershing Road Industrial District in Chicago—where the factories and the adjacent workers’ neighborhoods were designed in concert.²

Figure 1.8 Houses and factories side-by-side, Newmarket, Boston.

Figure 1.9 Pershing Road, Chicago, one of the first planned industrial districts in the US.

Most of the planned urban manufacturing districts in North America were not loft districts. Despite our association of the one-story “pancake factory” with suburban industrial parks, new low-rise manufacturing districts were pioneered not in the suburbs in the 1950s but in downtowns in the 1930s at places like the Crawford Industrial District in Chicago (1931).³

From the Machine in the Garden to the Machine Next Door: The “Urban-Suburban” Industrial Park

The troubled history of urban renewal is familiar: in so-called “blighted” places, streets were de-mapped to create superblocks capable of accommodating high-rise towers in precincts that were disconnected from the physical and social fabric of the surrounding neighborhoods. Less familiar is the fact that a parallel process was under way in the world of industrial redevelopment: of the 676 federally assisted urban renewal projects planned or underway in 1962, 119 were industrial, representing 23 percent of the acreage of all urban renewal projects. A photograph of one of these projects appeared on the 1955 cover of Commerce Magazine, with a caption that boasted, “Slums like these make way for modern industrial plants.”⁴

Figure 1.10 “Slums make way for Industry.” Cover of Commerce magazine, 1955.

To create larger sites for industrial urban renewal, the solution was the same as for other urban renewal projects: de-map streets to create superblocks capable of accommodating large-footprint, one-story factories with ample space for off-street loading and with room for horizontal expansion. By closing some streets but allowing others to remain open, the superblock represented a compromise between the perceived need to create a secure limited-access precinct for manufacturing and the need to connect to a dense urban context. One of the first of these was the West Central Industrial District in Chicago, planned and developed in the 1920s. In New York City, experiments with industrial urban renewal date to 1959, when the city began to study the feasibility of an industrial park on sixteen blocks of what became the Flatlands Industrial Park in Brooklyn. These early projects established what would become, and in many places remain, the model for the planned urban manufacturing district: replicating the suburban industrial park within the city—the “Urban-Suburban Industrial Park.” The prime example in New York is the Bathgate Industrial Park, developed by the Port Authority in 1982. From a purely industrial-redevelopment perspective, Bathgate may be considered a success, but it is nevertheless an inward-looking precinct with long expanses of blank wall repelling the surrounding neighborhood.

Figure 1.11 Bathgate Industrial Park, New York City, 1982; industrial redevelopment brings the suburban model to the city.

Connect or Protect: Industrial District Design Today

Whether urban manufacturing needs to be connected and integrated with the city or isolated and protected is the fundamental issue for industry in the city, as it has been since the origins of modern town planning. In terms of urban design, the edge of the district is the frontier where this tension plays out: a porous edge makes it easier for manufacturers to connect to skilled labor, designers, researchers, academics, retailers, and other complementary businesses and the markets they serve. On the other hand, a hard edge satisfies the perceived need to isolate manufacturing from adjacent activities because of noise, dust, and traffic, and especially to establish a defense against displacement by “higher and better uses.” Ironically this leads advocates to push for protected single-purpose precincts with restrictive regulations even though this is not the best environment for urban manufacturers, especially those who want to innovate.

Trying to balance these two intentions—integration or protection—shapes both policy and urban design, in particular around the degree to which uses should be mixed, the degree to which edges of the district are hard or soft, and the degree of street network connectivity between industrial and nonindustrial areas. One solution to the challenge of industrial mixed use is the “industrial campus,” where a mission-driven entity has control over real estate and can deliberately “curate the ecology” of the district. Examples include the Brooklyn Navy Yard and the Greenpoint Manufacturing and Design Center in N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Image Credits
• Acknowledgments
• List of Contributors
• i. Introduction
• ii. Overview of Urban Manufacturing
• iii. Notes from the Field: Interview with Greg Mark, Founder and CEO of Markforged
• PART I: The Design of Districts: The Neighborhood as Factory
• PART II: The Design of Factories: The Architecture of the Places of Production
• PART III: The Design of Policy: Making it Happen
• PART IV: Atlas: Places of Production and Design Strategies
• Index