Conor here: The types of communities featured in the following piece certainly seem to have the potential for better quality of life than 100 percent car-dependent suburbs, but is there a limit to how much places like Columbus, Ohio can change under their current layout? The city has a land area of roughly 570 square kilometers and a population of 933,263. For comparison, Madrid is 605 square kilometers with a population of 3.5 million.
And if we’re talking about lowering emissions, it’s probably worth remembering that world’s wealthiest 10 per cent have caused more than two-thirds of global warming since 1990 with the fifty richest billionaires producing more carbon emissions in under three hours than average British person does in their lifetime. But if focus on the Ohio suburbs we must, with less billionaire control over capital allocation, we could probably see a lot more public transit and projects like the one featured in the following piece.
By Sarah Wesseler, a writer and editor with more than a decade of experience covering climate change and the built environment. Originally published at Yale Climate Connections.
Dublin, Ohio’s Bridge Park development. 9Image credit: City of Dublin)
Like many American communities, Dublin, Ohio, grew from a small rural town in the 19th century into a sprawling suburb in the 20th. Today, it’s embracing a 21st-century development trend: walkability.
An affluent suburb of the Ohio capital, Columbus, Dublin is home to roughly 50,000 people. In recent years, the local government has shepherded the development of a walkable new neighborhood, Bridge Park, and built an attractive pedestrian bridge connecting it to the historic town center. Building on the success of this development, in 2024 the city council announced another ambitious project that will turn a 1980s office park into a walkable district with housing, shops, restaurants, public spaces, and workplaces.
Projects that aim to transform traditional suburban environments are increasingly common in the United States. Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson, architecture professors at Georgia Tech and the City College of New York, respectively, have been writing about similar efforts, which they call suburban retrofits, for almost two decades. In that time, they’ve seen massive growth in both the number of these projects and the level of ambition they display, with innovative strategies taking on issues like public health, aging populations, equity, jobs, and climate change, all while reducing car dependency.
“As of today, there’s well over 2,500 projects in our database, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” Dunham-Jones said. “I honestly can’t keep track of them all.”
Martin Zogran, an urban designer working on the Metro Center plan, said that his firm, Sasaki, is working on similar projects in other parts of the country.
“For office parks like Metro Center, cities and communities across the United States are revisiting them quite frequently now,” he said. “We just won a new project in Philadelphia in which we’ll be revisiting a very similar ‘70s, ‘80s office park.”
Less Driving, Lower Emissions
Efforts like these have important implications for climate change. Transportation is the largest source of emissions in the U.S., and the vehicles people use to get around every day are the main culprit. Electric vehicles can help reduce these emissions, but they can’t eliminate them completely; people also need to drive less.
But for many Americans, driving less seems unrealistic. Walkable neighborhoods make up a tiny fraction of the developed land in major U.S. cities, which, coupled with high demand for walkability, makes these communities more expensive than car-dependent suburbs. As a result, many people who would like a walkable lifestyle can’t afford it.
In the greater Columbus area, as in most American communities, the infrastructure and land use patterns are heavily weighted toward driving.
“It’s very hard to overstate how car-dependent the Columbus region is,” said Matthew Adair, an urban planner and researcher who grew up in Dublin. “If you don’t have a car, people assume there’s something wrong with you.”
As recognition of the downsides of car dependency grows, walkability advocates across the country are trying to give people more options for ways to move around. In Columbus, a planned two-mile pedestrian pathway downtown and a new bus rapid transit system showcase the kinds of innovations that large municipalities and regional organizations can bring to bear. But the governments of smaller cities also have important contributions to make, as Dublin’s efforts show.
Metro Center rendering. (Image credit: Sasaki)
Motivations for Change
Dublin’s push to build Bridge Park and Metro Center was driven by input from residents, according to Chris Will, an urban planner with the local government. The municipality updates its community plan one or two times a decade, conducting extensive outreach to understand what locals want to see in the area.
“What we’ve heard is our residents want Dublin to be more walkable and easier to bike, not just for recreational purposes, but to go to work, maybe, or shopping or restaurants,” he said. “Folks love having the chance to get out of their cars.”
The projects were also shaped by Dublin’s need to maintain its status as an attractive destination for workers and residents in the coming decades.
“Affluent communities like Dublin that are growing, that have a good job base already, can often make the investments and attract developers to spend the kind of money required for major redevelopments like Bridge Park and Metro Center,” Dunham-Jones said.
This doesn’t mean that wealthy areas are the only ones undertaking creative suburban redevelopment projects; projects just tend to take different forms elsewhere.
“Communities with weaker economies are more likely to regreen underused parking lots or reinhabit obsolete buildings with social infrastructure,” she said
Bridge Park was built on land formerly occupied by an underused strip mall and a closed driving range – not the most strategic uses for land directly across the river from the historic town center.
“Retail moves around as cities change over time, so the project aimed to reposition that area to be more competitive,” Will said. “The idea was for Bridge Park to have a mix of offices, condos, apartments, hotels, restaurants, shopping, and entertainment options, all centered around an urban, walkable street network grid.”
Similarly, Dublin’s government believes that Metro Center, an important source of income tax revenue for the city, needs a refresh to remain appealing to companies seeking office space.
Today, the site is “dominated by surface parking lots,” Zogram said. “There are single-use office buildings and a series of hotels, all scattered about quite far away from one another. It’s just not really aligned with modern expectations for office workers, or even someone staying in a hotel.”
Transformational Potential
The scale and ambition of these projects have made the city a model for the region, Will said. At a recent urban planning conference, several representatives from other Central Ohio communities told him that Dublin’s achievements have made them think more aspirationally about their own development opportunities.
Rachael Dorothy, the city council president of another Columbus suburb, Worthington, agrees. Bridge Park and Metro Center are “definitely unique and notable” in the area, she said. In particular, Dublin’s decision to allow mixed-use development – in other words, bringing living, working, and shopping together in adjacent spaces rather than keeping them separate, as most U.S. zoning regulations dictate – is forward-thinking, she said.
“Mixed-use development was the status quo for most of humanity until we had these zoning laws that started 100 years ago,” she said. “This zoning law has not served our cities well. Now we need to go back to doing the mixed-use development that was done in the rest of history.”
Zogran is similarly enthusiastic about helping Ohioans enjoy lifestyle benefits that have been out of reach in many American communities for decades.
“The project will introduce people to patterns very common in the past: being able to walk and maybe buy a gallon of milk, take your kids to a park, or go for a stroll or a bike ride without getting in your vehicle,” he said.
Challenges and Opportunities for Building Walkable Communities
Building walkable communities in the United States is difficult, and the teams behind Bridge Park and Metro Center have needed to work through a number of challenges. One of the most difficult, according to Zogran, is parking.
“Cities are getting very progressive about requiring fewer parking spaces, which is terrific,” he said. “But there are other challenges, some of which have to do with the developer.”
Developers need to generate revenue from office, retail, and residential properties, and many would-be tenants expect a certain number of parking spaces. This often requires a significant amount of parking, which, if provided in surface parking lots, would take up a high percentage of the available land, making it impossible to build a dense, walkable neighborhood. But the alternatives – parking towers and below-ground garages – are expensive to build, cutting into developers’ profits.
“Finding out how to get the value developers need but also create a compact urban form is one of the biggest challenges in the projects I work on,” Zogran said.
Community buy-in is another challenge. When the city started working on Bridge Park, not everyone was convinced that dense high-rise development was a good fit for the community. “To help overcome doubts, Dublin officials and developer Crawford Hoying invested in meeting with residents, workers, and other stakeholders.
“That developer spent a lot of time with the city doing public input and outreach to make the public aware of what they wanted to do and make them comfortable about doing it,” Dorothy said.
Dublin has also worked with community members to understand their ideas and concerns about Metro Center, Will said. It has also invested in high-quality graphics to communicate its vision for the project.
For this round, however, less convincing is needed.
“Now that we have Bridge Park as a success story to point to, Metro Center isn’t as much of an uphill battle,” he said. “People really do love Bridge Park.”
Maybe we need to revisit Bucky Fuller :-)
Other re-imaginings that come to mind: F. L. Wright Broadacre City proposal and Columbia, Maryland
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia,_Maryland
But Wright, who hated cities, liked cars as a way to escape them and Rouse’s planned community was a retreat from traditional cities rather than a return.
We have new trails here in my small city but fewer users now that Winter is at hand. One wonders whether that won’t be much more the case in frosty Ohio. A friend who grew up in Akron and walked to school had to wear a special snow suit.
In the lower middle-class, small-town-become-distant-suburb where my family lives in the mid-west, I’d say most car trips go to Walmart. Why not make these places walkable by sinking the Walmart: put the whole thing underground (no windows in it in any case), then build housing and amenities on top of it. You could have a bunch of little entrances with staircases or elevators…like little subway entrances everywhere. Projects like the one in Columbus described above probably make it easy to walk to a restaurant or coffee shop, but is that really where everyone is usually driving to all the time ?
I don’t think projects like this can really work. Firstly, it’s the small businesses that give a walkable conurbation the community focus, like the trendy parts of London in the ’60s, NYC before Covid. You can’t invent a downtown Paris just like that. Secondly, the majority of people don’t have the leisure time or money to provide their part. So it relies on becoming trendy and attracting the middle-class non-working moms-who-lunch audience. And if THAT works, the prices go up and it all dies.
Great article! Thank you! Keep up the good work!
One of our former US Representatives, James Oberstar, also an avid cyclist, in the 1960s was responsible for the conversion of the abandoned railways of the 1890s into recreational trails throughout the US. I doubt his legislation had a national effect, but in the Minneapolis/St. Paul area the impact was significant.
While we suffer greatly from auto induced sprawl, parts of the succeeding generations have continued his efforts. The Minnesota Bike Alliance continues to lobby the State Legislature for separated bikeways built adjacent to public roads and other pedestrian/cyclist infrastructure.
They also have successfully lobbied cities to lower their speed limits on residential streets down to 20 mph.
Where I live the auto traffic is so bad, I have to time my rare auto travel to specific times of the day, but can bicycle for all my errands and shopping pretty much anytime. The difficult thing for most people is winter weather and awkward work locations.
One of the downsides of this success in the popularity of the trails is weekend pedestrian trail congestion, but due to lower street speed limits, and sympathetic auto drivers I can use adjacent local streets to safely complete my travels.
Keep your heads up and savor the moment!
Within a few months, auto expenses could make car sharing a reality. Any major alterations to towns and cities now may be premature.
You are correct in your last statement, but need to understand that changes creep into effect through people’s expectations over a long period of time at a local level.
When I moved to my current location, very few people considered slower methods of travel and the auto industry still has a major impact on State planning and build outs. Talking to State Highway planners they still have the outdated notion that everyone will be happily stuck bumper to bumper in traffic with their self driving cars.
However, the consistent number one polling issue on a local level is safe walkable streets and pedestrian/bike paths.
Interestingly, based upon my observations, bike ways next to highways seem not attractive due to traffic noise. IMHO, based in the popularity of tree lined corridors, ie recreation trails, the desire is to be out in nature.
As insane as it seems, people still will drive their autos many miles to get to such corridors. Based on my experience bikeways along busy highways are only necessary to get through bottle necks.
With all due respect to Ms. Wesseler’s glowing description of this project and the city of Dublin, I live 45 min away and am underwhelmed by anything Dublin plans. I have visited, with a relative who has a cousin who lives there, and Dublin does a great job of living in denial that it is surrounded by a city with a large nonwhite population that in patches, is significantly immiserated and subject to violence. What I noticed when I visited was how white it was, how close, cheek by jowl, the homes of upper middle class people were, and yes, most of it is very car-centric.
Of course, I am an admirer of very different urban reimagining projects, like the one developed by the firm Assemble, in the Toxteth neighborhood of Liverpool in the UK. I’d much rather live somewhere like that than anywhere in Dublin, Ohio.
The idea of redesigning for walkability is great, but can’t they do better than this? (No, because the primary goal of RE developers in Columbus is to make a bundle.)
Assemble’s Winter Garden Grows Activism in Liverpool https://share.google/WNRxWJ6PgRJcDdaRz
We here in SC are under no illusions about the motives behind our new trail system. Some of the adjacent apt complexes have named themselves ‘Trailside.’
Still I suspect for many around the US any non commercial spaces are a new thing.
Columbus and its surrounding “white flight” suburbs are unrecognizable in this article to me, a lifelong resident. During early childhood we lived in the city which was very walkable with access to neighborhood grocery, 5 and dime, and hardware stores, churches, movies, bowling alleys, library, S&L (remember those), 4 or 5 large parks. By age 10 or so we’d rise in the morning, enjoy breakfast and then make our way on our bikes ranging up to a 2 mile radius – to 3 miles or so as we hit our teens. dropping back for lunch usually then out again until dinner. There was even a “shopping center” at the edge of our range with even more attractions.
Quickly, Columbus was a sleepy sub-500k connected collection of small towns in the 50s. Being blocked at a RR crossing was the norm traffic-wise. Public transportation was an electric bus line to get you downtown where the original retail was relocated and where the elite have ALWAYS focused “our” monies on the property that THEY own. It was surround with even sleepier and much smaller little towns which ramped up in growth oh, around the early 60’s – you know, civil rights rights time. These little burgs were “in the country”. We didn’t even have an outerbelt yet.
Now Columbus is at 2 million with a much expanded mostly green space “metropolitan” boundary and we are being constanly reminded that we will be at 3 million and necessarily need to revamp as in all but eliminate our already deficient zoning laws to meet the challenge.
The wife and I spent 20+ years working in the downtown area as the monied interests ensured that much of the State public sector was forced into this area. As a child we’d venture downtown with mom on special occasions/appointments on the electric bus (overhead cables). There were a number of shops lining the main drag with the largest being Lazarus, a 6 floor offering with a couple of “annexes” – more than enough for our little burg. As things “progressed” all those downtown shops gave way to the perimeter shopping centers and then to the malls. Near the peak of the retail buildout there was even a mall built in the downtown area – viable for a decade or so.
Columbus was noted in 2000 for a massive overbuild of retail space and we’re still working through the collapse. The malls are down from 6 or so to 3 with the smallest (a couple miles from us) close to closing. We use it for weather induced walking. The other 2 are in play though they have had their share precarity
No busing for us as children. Walked sometimes, biked to school (.5-.75 mile) even in the snow (good times). Columbus at that time was just a collection of connected small towns pretending to be a city. Had a longtime mayor named Sensenbrenner who at one point revealed one of the larger porn collections – hardly a threatening politician.
Now we have a billionaire named Wexner (of Limited/Epstein/Mega Group fame) and it shows in the decline of our infrastructure to say the least. He pushed typical east of the Mississippi urban development from the Northwest to the Northeast with his New Albany corruption. Even built his own mall, Easton, killing off aat least one existing mall. Got his very own freeway exit – no small feat in an area of chronic highway funding need.
Columbus also is quickly becoming noted for its 100+ datacenters not to mention our own Intel semiconductor fab site. The New Albany group is making a killing parlaying our green space. We currently live in one of the earlier suburbs and we have within “walking distance” a 5 building amazon buildout and a couple blocks away someone built what appears to be a “spec” one. Another massive Amazon complex just a couple miles south of us near the “new” Penn Central rail yard. We’ll be building a new water plant – for Intel and the datacenters after paying for billions in past due maintenance to our water system. The lack of water slots has been all that’s held back in even more sprawl. The area is surrounded with tomorrow’s little problem of a huge number of polluting well/septic systems.
I even remember when Columbus had a rail passenger service – took a “memorable” 20+ hour trip to NYC in an unheated car during the winter near the end of said service.
Almost all of Columbus’s development money is focused on the central area – where most of the old money property is owned. Most recently a couple hundred million went to adding a massive sewer upgrade (involved burying a huge excavation machine for a couple years). They even dregged the Scioto to reclaim more “land” for the “public”.
This provided a big boost to property values downtown even as the last retail major retail space the City Center mall was removed as if it never existed and thousands of 10-year (then 15-year) tax abated living units were added. We are not NYC. You can easily zip around town from one side to the other in 20-30m. Downtown housing was more than adequate at one time. But after after decades of landlord neglect, there was much less desirable living units. It wasn’t missed.
We worked 15m (18m) away from home to downtown. There is nothing left downtown of interest retail-wise. Just weekday congestion. We trek down there a few times a year and never see evidence of the 5-7000 living pods’ inhabitants. It is not walkable for groceries for all but a few. Restaurants don’t last that long – largely too expensive for the house-poor. The tax-free aspect made the pods more than a little attractive during the ZIRP/bubble period – double your money with good timing. They actually extended the tax free part.
The rest of the city proper has been sorely neglected as you might imagine – lots of plans, no money – money mostly went downtown. One key indicator is the 300+ miles of chronically under maintained neighborhood streets There are still a few “named” small towns in the city proper and they are struggling. They still have the feel of a neighborhood but we left in the late 80s when it became more than apparent that as an individual you were at the mercy of a rapidly declining infrastructure. They city also has hundreds of miles of woefully neglected alleys not to mention sewer system. The electrical distribution system – well, when the local utility was bought by AEP that was the end of expectations there.
My view on urban renewal whold be a massive below ground and up reconstruction – jobs for all kind of potential and a real use of tax dollars). The city would be gridded, emptied, cleared and rebuilt – a 20-30y project no doubt. If Dublin is an example of our planning capability it’s hopeless. And unless you’re willing to tackle the basic issue of instituting civilized behavior (re-instituting seems a tad late at this point) as in basic politeness you’d need significant consideration of density imposed constraints to offset selfish and/or oblivious behavior. (Can’t wait to see how the tech-bros handle this in their new city states).
Columbus didn’t participate in the first real estate bubble but we caught up starting around 2015. Our $100k area is now a $450-500k area. This was initially one of the first real suburbs as in not an extension of some small local burg – some 600 units plated in the 50s which kicked in development-wise with the civil rights era. The “professionals” that migrated were seeking not just flight but “cheap” flight. We did more than our share of housing maintenance in the 60s and we viewed these as crap housing at the time. Most of the area is comprised of split-levels. The few ranches were small (12-1500 sq feet). We live in one of the larger (2000 sq ft) center hall 2 story salt boxes – initially all electric. The housing development initially had its own water tower – only later did city water/sewer extend to about 2/3 of the area. Natural gas didn’t arrive until later either – so mostly oil/propane burners for heat.
There are still well/septic systems with under an acre of lot – it isn’t pretty if you look closely. After the “Parade of Homes” was sited here in ’63 even cheaper construction kicked in. I even chatted with a few of the original owners who were proud of their more frugal units leveraging some of the slightly better quality accompanying the home show bump. Hip roofs couldn’t have saved that much considering future maintenance costs.
We’ve watched with a sense of disgust and amusement the expansion in our northern Dublin area. Dublin is home to the Muirfield tournament where the elite jet in once a year. The rest of the time it’s appears to be an experiment for turning green space into congested development with ill-planned traffic patterns and overpriced living and retail space, the Bridge Park development being one of the more egregious examples. Local social media is rife with testaments to the crap quality and high rent of the apartments offered.
That’s a bird’s eye picture they have of the site – much better than on the ground. We drive around there more than a little and we’ve yet to see anyone on that bridge. It’s a trek over that open sewer known as the Scioto River – not for the casual walker to be sure. as it leads from the featured congested area to the “old” Dublin area which has been transformed with even more dense offerings. You could walk around there if you can find a place to park – don’t like being force to pay to park. We haven’t seen anything worth stopping for in the last couple years – the restaurants are expensive and unremarkable.
We are big walkers – every day 3 or 4 miles. Used to ride bikes from our west side home in the city proper to the far north side of the city beyond the outerbelt – 20+ miles one way. There were even a few miles of trails. Stopped in early 90s – too dangerous especially after seeing a dead biker on the side of the road. Been listening to talk for 30-40 years on all the bike trails that will be built – still waiting. Columbus and surroundings is somewhat walkable as long as walking is all you’re interested in. Walking TO somewhere not so much. Dublin’s latest “development” is a big win for the developers, as usual – not so much for the “walking to” crowd.
Just some reflections/thoughts
The irony is that climate change-mitigation efforts focus on lowering or eliminating fossil fuel emissions and building alternate energy systems. This is all well and good, but it ignores the ‘low-hanging fruit’. As this article shows, creating walkable cities and suburbs reduces automobile emissions. Likewise, more buses (preferably electric) would do more. In the long run, repositioning housing and work would be even better, such as in the factory towns of old before the personal automobile. Other elements of transportation also need addressing. Just by reducing consumption and reinventing supply chains and production, carbon emissions would go down. This would eliminate the common saying, “the white man likes his food to travel a long way.” In short, while alternate energy systems, except for nuclear, can never be equivalent to the current energy system, changes can be made that actually improve the quality of life while mitigating carbon emissions.
Back 25 years ago, a noted New Urbanist told me that there were 16 land use templates that the bankers would approve for loans. There was no use in proposing a 17th. No matter what the do-gooders envisioned, the money men were having none of it. And who ever heard of a developer going against the cash flow?