In the wake of deindustrialization and economic shifts, industrial estates in the Western world have faced strong changes in programmatic demands. While strategically situated urban brownfields have held a central position in contemporary urban design practice and discourses in the past, industrial estates, developed since the 1960s in suburban peripheries, have become central to these practices and discourses only recently. Drawing on a case study of the productive landscape of the Dutch Parkstad conurbation, this paper offers a novel research agenda for urban design in relation to industrial estates that developed under conditions of dispersal.
