The expansion of the Scots Church in Sydney, Australia, is a project that redefines urban development conceptions of historic preservation and adaptive use. This redevelopment involved the conversion of a historic church and its air rights into a 146-unit, environmentally sensitive apartment building with commercial and office uses at its lower levels. Rechristened the “Portico” Scots Church, the resulting architectural feat integrates a neo-Gothic relic with contemporary metal-and-glass residential towers.
Bridgeland is an 11,400-acre master-planned community northwest of Houston, Texas, which will be home to 65,000 residents when complete in 2037. Like the Woodlands, its predecessor, the Bridgeland site plan centers on scenic lakes that improve water quality, irrigate during droughts, and draw residents to common areas for recreation. These lakes form a stormwater system that exceeds local design requirements, and which has managed storm events much larger than those anticipated.
Sino‐Ocean Taikoo Li Chengdu is a retail-driven mixed-use project that weaves old and new, global and local, low-rise and high-rise, and religious and commercial uses into a pedestrian-centered urban fabric within a growing central Chinese city. The 18.25-acre site includes more than 300 retailers within 1.14 million square feet of retail space, a 335,000-square-foot boutique hotel with 100 rooms and 42 serviced apartments, and a 1.3 million-square-foot, 47-story office tower—all wrapped around an ancient Buddhist temple, six adaptively reused heritage buildings, and three on-site plazas. The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) for Neighborhood Development Gold-rated community brought over 110 new retailers to the market.
When Hurricane Paulina swept inland in October 1997, one of the hardest-hit locales was Acapulco. The all-important tourism industry was devastated for about two weeks, while the suffering experienced by the people who serviced that industry—people who lived inland in makeshift squatter housing built on hillsides, riversides, and other marginal land—lasted for months thereafter. Landslides, floods, and 290-kilometer-per-hour (180 mph) winds left 400,000 people homeless and 400 dead in Acapulco alone.
If the physical archetype for traditional neighborhood developments (TNDs) in the United States is colonial Charleston, Savannah, or Annapolis, the holistic prototype has always been Chautauqua. Founded in 1874 on Lake Chautauqua in southwestern New York state by two Methodist ministers as a summer retreat for Sunday-school teachers, it has grown to be ecumenical in its religious, cultural, educational, and recreational programs, and it has grown in size as well, from 129 acres (52 ha) at the beginning to 600 acres (243 ha) today. “Chautauqua,” a Seneca word meaning “one has taken the fish out there,” soon came to mean leisure time adult education with a somewhat evangelistic but nondenominational fervor, and today it means, more broadly, a retreat from daily life for reflection, discussion, and instruction in the company of like-minded people.
Bradburn is a $220 million, 123-acre (49.8-hectare), mixed-use, master-planned new urbanist community in Westminster, Colorado—an inner suburb of 107,000 residents located on the northwest boundary of Denver in Adams County. When completed, Bradburn will feature more than 800 residences—275 single-family homes, 150 townhouses, 310 rental apartments in Bradburn Row, and 33 live/work units—along with 108 apartments sitting above 154,830 square feet (14,384 square meters) of retail space arranged in a main street format. In addition, there will be 29,000 square feet (2,694 square meters) of office space, a preschool, a church, and 16 acres (6.5 hectares) of open space. Comprising three neighborhoods and a village core with shops, restaurants, offices, and residences, Bradburn represents Westminster’s first implementation of new urbanist zoning to create a compact, walkable mixed-use neighborhood.
The ¥270 billion (US$2.47 billion) Roppongi Hills project, also known as the Roppongi 6-chome Redevelopment project, is the largest private sector redevelopment ever completed in Japan. Covering approximately 11.6 hectares (28.7 acres) of prime real estate in the Minato Ward, Roppongi Hills integrates office, residential, and retail uses, a hotel, a TV broadcasting studio, and cultural functions, such as a museum, with parks and plazas that constitute the majority of open space. Jointly developed by Mori Building Company and the Roppongi 6-chome Redevelopment Association, this urban regeneration scheme aims to create a true cultural center.
Lorton Station is a 370.4-acre (150-hectare) mixed-use, master-planned community located in Fairfax County, Virginia, just 15 miles (24 kilometers) south of Washington, D.C., in an area that had been overshadowed for more than a century by a large prison complex. Set alongside a commuter rail line (with a station on site), the community contains 1,181 residential units–including single-family homes, condominiums, townhouses, and market-rate and affordable apartments–as well as 192,842 square feet (17,915 square meters) of retail space and 109,486 square feet (10,171 square meters) of office space in two separate locations (a town center and a shopping center), plus an elementary school, a church, and a 100-acre (40.5-hectare) stream valley park. Lorton Station’s designers and developers used smart growth and transit-oriented development principles to create a community intended to appeal to new homebuyers and commercial tenants while providing much-needed amenities for the area’s existing residents.
