Transforming Cities
Dennis Frenchman revitalizes and builds new city centers where the lines between work, life, and culture blend and merge.
Dennis Frenchman is in the business of ultra-mega-extreme makeovers. As a long-time faculty member of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning as well as professor in the MIT Center for Real Estate (CRE), Frenchman’s work has largely been about transforming cities to adapt and thrive in the 21st century digital economy. First and foremost an architect and city planner, Frenchman’s expertise in helping cities evolve from one place in time to today and beyond is centered on a love and appreciation of city life and those who live in them. “I want to improve the efficiency of cities, improve quality of life, make cities more attractive, redress inequities, and maximize the potentials the city may have,” he says. Frenchman began his career with regeneration projects in former industrial cities like Lowell, Massachusetts. There he helped transform the city from one of the highest places of unemployment in the late 1970s to the first urban National Park that attracts 600,000 people a year. That evolution has attracted new and advanced industry to millions of square feet of 19th century mill space. He has achieved similar successes for other mill and steel towns, ports, canals, and oil and coal regions. In the process, he developed a lifelong interest in the relationship between people, culture, and ‘place.’
At MIT, Frenchman is Director of Innovation for the School of Architecture and Planning and a founder of DesignX, a new accelerator program focusing on design and the built environment. A registered architect, he is a founding principal of ICON architecture in Boston an international architecture and urban design firm.
Having seen the development process from both sides, he has a unique understanding of the needs, challenges, and opportunities facing cities and towns and those parties interested in being a part of the redevelopment.
“Cities are the centers of economy and innovation, of work,” Frenchman says. Some of the issues cities are coping with are age old – improving mobility, enhancing equity and serving all people who live there – but some challenges are new due to rapid urbanization globally. With millions of people migrating toward cities, the pressures on current city systems are unsustainable.
“We see many 20th century urban systems ‘fracking,’ by which I mean they are fragmenting and failing,” Frenchman comments. One such system is the private car. The past solution of widening roads to enhance mobility has practical limits in the fabric of cities. Instead, the car is being reinvented – both the hardware and software – into a different kind of mobility system that is part mass transit/part private car and much more efficient. Other ‘fracking systems’ include traditional systems of land use. For example, retail – the way goods are obtained—is changing dramatically and traditional office space is vanishing. And cities cannot escape realities such as sea level rise – obviously starting with those located on ocean coasts. “These new realities all present design and development problems needing to be addressed,” he adds.
The fact that industry is returning to cities is largely a result of the transformation of the global economy into a digital economy that allows 21st century industries to move almost anywhere and occupy almost any kind of space. “The kind of places that are emerging as centers of production now include housing, social space, a mix of industries and research, and commerce that are all clustered together,” Frenchman explains. “We call them new century cities or innovation districts or productive neighborhoods.” MIT and its surrounding community is a perfect and classic example including an urban district near a major university.
Today, Frenchman is focused mainly on building productive neighborhoods, his term, including the largest digital media city in Asia built in Seoul, South Korea on a former landfill two miles long and a hundred feet high. Established eight years ago, the Seoul Digital Media City is home to 20,000 people and 5,000 start-up companies; 50,000 people are employed there. “It has enabled Korea to create a real media focus – it’s probably the largest media cluster in that part of the world including China,” he says. “What’s great about the digital economy is that wherever you are located you can access the highest quality, most sophisticated digital tools instantly and for not much money.”
Frenchman has planned similar communities including the Digital Mile in Zaragoza, Spain, Media City: UK in Salford, England which is home to much of the BBC’s production studios, Twofour54 in AbuDhabi, Ciudad Creative Digital in Guadelajara, Mexico, and Innovation District Medellin, Colombia.
Today’s current generation of young people is the first to be digital literates, digital natives. They grew up completely comfortable with social media, internet, digital connections and that influences the way they are engaging the world. Frenchman describes this generation as less consumption oriented, less privacy-oriented and more into sharing or group work rather than individual competitive work. They prefer open innovation and are more entrepreneurial. “They have at their fingertips access to the whole world, all markets, all people,” he says. “They know the competition and can produce value in a space anywhere. And they are returning to cities.”
In the past, people agglomerated for production near natural resources. Now the drivers are people, ideas, and conversation. That is what is motivating a lot of economic growth. Pulling these people together in new kinds of communities – productive neighborhoods – is the result. Says Frenchman, “This will only increase so you might as well get into the transformation now which is what cities and companies are realizing.”