SMART DISTRICTS AS AN APPROACH TO REIGNITE PR’s MANUFACTURING HUBS
What do breweries, indoor agriculture, and digital fabrication labs have in common? These are part of the revitalization of legacy manufacturing hubs.
Manufacturing in 21st century Puerto Rico no longer relies on polluting smokestacks and melters and instead focuses on biotechnology, computer and electronics, basic chemicals, medical devices, beverages and tobacco, amongst others. Planners have been retooling the obsolete industrial district model to address how clean manufacturing fits into the urban fabric creating, “Smart Districts’’. These “SMART DISTRICTS” that are designed as holistic land-use areas, they are greener, they are interconnected, and due to their lower impact on the city, they become integral to the cities in which they are built. Innovative technologies have made this possible. The age of noisy and polluting factories is outsourced or buffered away. Advances in technology with automation and robotics have made manufacturing facilities a good neighbor.
Our government leaders should prioritize the conversion of existing government-owned facilities like the PRIDCO industrial parks into launchpads for emerging businesses focused on exports as part of a broader strategy to increase the island’s GDP and, ultimately, its residents’ welfare. Plusurbia’s Master Planned recommendations to reinvent Wynwood’s Industrial District in Miami, which had an extensive inventory of warehouses and former industrial sites, provides a pathway to achieve this. Wynwood Revitalization District Plan reconsidered the area’s flexible warehouse spaces near Downtown Miami to create a mixed use incubator for tech and other innovative industries.
The Puerto Rico Industrial Development Company developed industrial parks after the 1950s and has the most extensive inventory of industrial properties in Puerto Rico, with over 1,500 properties strategically distributed throughout the island. The facilities benefit from their prime location and provide an attractive incentive for novel industries such as the knowledge economy. In order to attract technology companies, urban farming, and innovation, these areas can maximize workers’ output if they are adjacent and connected to other uses and services, reducing travel time and improving convenience. Safe and accessible mobility options and amenities such as housing, commercial uses, and open space in the vicinity or integrated within these industry hubs prove essential for their success.
Reusing the hundreds of vacant or underutilized facilities, applying the Smart District model is key to achieving economic development while making the most of existing facilities. Small business successes such as Fok Brewing in Caguas and Wunjo Bakery in Guayama show PRIDCO facilities’ can serve as launchpads for emerging local businesses as part of a broader strategy to increase occupancy.
Buildings within the Smart District must serve as a type of multi-purpose production space. Open floor-spaces and ceilings heights appeal to a variety of tenants enabling some of the most flexible and adaptable building types. They can be transformed into urgent care, general healthcare facilities, educational, community centers, tech-business incubators, or even affordable housing benefiting neighboring communities if international businesses move elsewhere, as has happened before.
The Smart District model enhances city life and potentially conserves valuable land elsewhere that otherwise would be needed to build new industrial facilities. The Hub model provides advantages to create this type of development in existing industrial or designated brownfield sites. They can be converted into vibrant manufacturing, research, and educational facilities all within a place to live, work, and entertain for its employees and for the benefit of the island’s communities in general. Advancing master-planned manufacturing hubs will be critical to attracting world-class innovators and ensuring healthy building occupancy rates overtime.
The following recommendations can steer these objectives:
- Create an inventory of properties and sizes, as well as corresponding compatible uses such as manufacturing, mixed-use, institutional, etc.
- Identify significant clusters and sponsor a redesign through a master plan process
- Install renewable energy microgrids to power “Smart Districts”
- Design inclusive public spaces as well as public transit options to provide mobility alternatives and manage congestion while growing the economy
- Encourage the establishment of co-working spaces and pop-up shops as part of a broader strategy to encourage small business creation
- Set aside spaces for locally-owned businesses with living wages
- Encourage cutting edge technology with automation in industries such as urban agriculture, tech firms, bio-economy, ocean technology, creative industries, medical cannabis growth, industrial hemp production, and light manufacturing
