CREJ

December 2020 \ BUILDING DIALOGUE \ 21 gejohnson.com Leading and building projects with the best people and ideas 260 North Josephine Street Denver, CO Similarly, the Strategic Development Plan for Denver In- ternational Airport that our firm authored worked to create a series of urban districts grounded in their context and landscape. These districts, as they unfold, have a strong pub- lic realm framework connecting them to natural processes, distant views, and user experiences that will set them apart from other developments within the same market – and ul- timately make themmore valuable. It is the clarity of the public life plan that differentiates these developments and ultimately captures value. • IncreasingROI through investment inpublic land. From a public land perspective, private investment in a particular area can be used to achieve both larger public good while at the same time fostering greater ROI for a developer’s private projects. Thismight include incremental strategies such as the gen- eral improvement district of River North, which involves master planning several streetscape corridors. Working with the various property owners, we created a cohesive vision for the public realm that can then be subsequently built out by each property owner as they redevelop. This also can be done on a larger scale, such as our firm’s work with Golub and Formativ, in collaboration with Tryba Architects, on the master plan for the Denargo Market site. This privately developed newdistrict seeks to create greater value for both the individual project as well as for the larg- er neighborhood by investing in the public riverfront, with new parks and open space. In addition to these two project examples, there are a number of other tools that can be utilized in connection with private investment, such as impact fees, value capture and public-private partnerships to achieve more and a high- er-quality public realm. All of these tools, when utilized in the right way, can bring even greater value to private real estate development while ushering in immense public good. At the end of the day, the goal should be to look for win-win opportunities that breathe great public life into our cities. We strongly believe this can be achieved by leveraging the public realm for pri- vate development and private development for the public realm. Even in the most complex urban environments and challenging sites this all startswith “public-life-first” design. As this column continues, we will be exploring the im- portance of public realm and placemaking in the process of city building, and how the space between buildings of- ten becomes the platform for how our lives unfold, for our most controversial issues, and for our moments of cele- bration. Utilizing national and international perspectives, we will focus on how these ideas play out in the Denver metro area. \\ The Space Between