The Net of Mixed Beads Suburban Office Development in Six Metropolitan Regions

Abstract

In the past few decades we have witnessed an explosion of suburban office development, but we are only beginning to understand the pattern of development that is emerging. In this article six longitudinal case studies are used to test the validity of four descriptive theories of office suburbanization. Urban villages, office corridors, and other popular theories prove to be too simple to capture the actual complexity in the case studies. A more complex pattern is evolving in which the majority of office space is located outside the regional CBD, with some scattered away from freeways, but most located in a large number of small and moderate-sized, low intensity clusters along freeway corridors. It will be important to evaluate the impacts of this emerging pattern on various planning issues and to better understand its underlying causes, if city planners wish to alter current trends. A new metropolis is upon us, and we need to understand what will be a critical element of the twenty-first century metropolitan region.