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.”
