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Title:

Stamford, Connecticut: From Traditional Downtown to Edge City

Accession Number:

01587894

Record Type:

Component

Abstract:

Since undergoing ‘urban renewal’ in the late 1960s and 1970s, when 72% of the downtown land coverage by buildings was demolished and replaced with uses intended to restore the city’s vital commercial and retail center, the center of Stamford, Connecticut has become a model “Edge City” rather than a traditional downtown. At the heart of downtown lies Stamford Town Center, a behemoth shopping mall with 853,000 square feet of leasable space, equivalent to 20 acres or 15 football fields. Surrounding this are numerous office towers, often constructed atop multi- story parking garages. The number of parking spaces in downtown Stamford tripled between 1965 and 2010. The area had six times as many off-street parking spaces (33,540) as residents (5,571) in 2010. This is also equivalent to 1.4 parking spaces for every one of the almost 24,000 downtown workers. An examination of city records around the time of the urban renewal distinctly shows that city officials were intentional in their efforts to accommodate automobiles to attract business and retail. A key to downtown development has been the city’s proximity both to New York City and to amenities such as country clubs and suburban estates that have appealed to CEOs. While Stamford continues to capitalize on its geographic good fortune, the automobile-dependent model in which people commute into Stamford is vulnerable to congestion on the I-95 corridor (a major throughway connecting the New York City metro area and the Mid-Atlantic with New England). The urban fabric post urban renewal of large blocks and streets also does little to support traditional mixed-use Transit-Oriented Development projects.

Supplemental Notes:

This paper was sponsored by TRB committee ADD30 Standing Committee on Transportation and Land Development.

Monograph Accession #:

01584066

Report/Paper Numbers:

16-6744

Language:

English

Corporate Authors:

Transportation Research Board

500 Fifth Street, NW
Washington, DC 20001 United States

Authors:

Olinski, Neil C
Garrick, Norman W
Atkinson-Palombo, Carol M

Pagination:

19p

Publication Date:

2016

Conference:

Transportation Research Board 95th Annual Meeting

Location: Washington DC, United States
Date: 2016-1-10 to 2016-1-14
Sponsors: Transportation Research Board

Media Type:

Digital/other

Features:

Maps; Photos; References; Tables

Geographic Terms:

Stamford (Connecticut)

Subject Areas:

Highways; History; Planning and Forecasting; I72: Traffic and Transport Planning

Source Data:

Transportation Research Board Annual Meeting 2016 Paper #16-6744

Files:

TRIS, TRB, ATRI

Created Date:

Jan 12 2016 6:56PM