01 Nov 2011
Brian Snyder / Reuters
"Emptiness is a recurring condition in America's urban areas. The crash of the housing market has left homeowners underwater, and developers with evaporated financing and stalled projects. But while homes may have earned most of the attention as the real estate market’s crash continues to reverberate through cities, thousands of commercial sites have also been left empty in its wake.
Empty parking lots, boarded up storefronts, dirt plots waiting for development. For cities these pieces of land blight their surroundings and drag down property values. But they don’t all have to. A new initiative aims to work with cities to reimagine empty plots of commercial land as a network of open spaces, taking commercial properties in the red and turning them into parks.
The project, “Redfields to Greenfields,” is the brainchild of the Speedwell Foundation, and is currently being developed by researchers at Georgia Tech with the help of the City Parks Alliance advocacy group. The idea is to look at what could be accomplished in cities with high rates of empty commercial sites if those plots of land were converted into parks."
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