Dr. Dustin C. Read, who currently serves as the William and Mary Alice Park Junior Faculty Fellow in the Program in Real Estate at Virginia Tech, recently won a prize for his research on innovation districts presented at the 2017 meeting of the American Real Estate Society in San Diego, CA.  His paper titled "Innovation Districts at the Crossroads of the Entrepreneurial City and the Sustainable City", co-authored with Dr. Drew Sanderford of the University of Arizona, was recognized as the best paper in the mixed-use development category.  An abstract of the work is provided below.

 

Abstract: Real estate projects commonly referred to as innovation districts have been praised for their ability to transform urban areas in ways that are environmentally sustainable, socially responsible, and economically resilient to market cycles. Drawing on qualitative analyses of several innovation districts in the United States, this paper explores the above praise-proposition in an effort to disentangle myth from reality.  Interviews with forty professionals involved in the planning, development and implementation of these projects indicate that a host of variables influence the extent to which sustainability is taken into account in a given transaction.  The results also suggest stakeholder demands and public policy objectives tend to have an impact on these projects that is equal to, if not greater, than market dynamics.  These findings point towards pathways for future qualitative and quantitative research on innovation districts including honing in on definitions that differentiate them from other urban development strategies relying on the idea of Marshallian clusters where sustainable construction, location, and economic development are deployed to stimulate or harness the power of creative destruction in some area of industry.