infill

Kaiser Medical Center in Richmond, California has infilled its employee parking to expand the hospital's emergency services department.

Infill in its broadest meaning is material that fills in an otherwise unoccupied space. The term is commonly used in association with construction techniques such as wattle and daub, and civil engineering activities such as land reclamation.

Urban infill

In the urban planning and development industries, infill is the use of land within a built-up area for further construction, especially as part of a community redevelopment or growth management program or as part of smart growth. It focuses on the reuse and repositioning of obsolete or underutilized buildings and sites. This type of development is essential to renewing blighted neighborhoods and knitting them back together with more prosperous communities.^[1]

Suburban infill

Suburban infill describes the development of land in existing suburban areas that was left vacant during the development of the suburb. It is one of the tenets of the New Urbanism and smart growth trends of urging densification to reduce the need for automobiles, encourage walking, and ultimately save energy. One exception to this is the practice of urban agriculture, in which land in the urban or suburban area is retained to grow food for local consumption.

The Village of Ponderosa^[2] in West Des Moines, Iowa is a good example of suburban infill. It was formerly a 9-hole golf course surrounded by suburban West Des Moines businesses and tract homes, but starting in 2006 it was redeveloped into a higher-density mixed-use community with a pedestrian friendly retail center.

Infill housing

Infill housing is the insertion of additional housing units into an already approved subdivision or neighborhood. These can be provided as additional units built on the same lot, by dividing existing homes into multiple units, or by creating new residential lots by further subdivision or lot line adjustments. Units may also be built on vacant lots.

Infill residential development does not require the subdivision of greenfield land, natural areas, or prime agricultural land. Existing infrastructure may in some cases need little expansion for utility and other services.

As with other new construction, structures built as infill may clash architecturally with older, existing buildings.

Infill, a water and aeolian process

Examples of infills occur in geology. The Touchet Formation of rhythmite layers located in the Northwestern United States, had intervening periods of aridity. Erosional cracks were later infilled with layers of soil material, especially from aeolian processes. The infilled sections formed vertical inclusions in the horizontally deposited layers of the Touchet Formation, and thus explaining events that intervened in time among the forty-one layers that were deposited.

External links

• San Francisco Bay Area's Greenbelt Alliance: Infill Primer PDF (109 KiB)
• "Strategies for Successful Infill Development" by the Northeast-Midwest Institute PDF (3.54 MiB)
• Denver Infill.com - a comprehensive overview and photographic survey of all the urban infill and redevelopment projects in the greater Downtown Denver area

References