Business park

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A business park in Santa Barbara County, California

For a property containing a group of businesses, see serviced office.

A business park or business estate is an area of land in which many office buildings are grouped together. All of the work that goes on is commercial, not industrial or residential. These are popular in many suburban locations, where it is cheaper to develop land because of the lower land costs and the lower building costs for building wider, not necessarily higher. They are also often located near motorways or main roads. Criticism of business parks often relates to the failure of business parks to relate to the urban fabric of the city:

A result of this form of territorial colonization is the proliferation of spaces which escape the control of the built realm: voids between fragments of unconnected residential schemes, gaps between urbanized zones, abandoned farmland, etc. While we debate on whether the traditional city block is a näive solution to the problem of ordering immediate periphery, a new approach to spacial organization arises with the ease that characterizes any new consumer good, an approach which questions the conventional references of urbanism: the so-called 'commercial, industrial, business and theme park'. ...

The urbanized park originally sprang the hybridization of the garden-city and Anglo-Saxon university campus models. It adopted the former's low-rise buildings and attention to free spaces as a way of shaping the environment, and the latter's autonomous constructions. In sum, parks are thematic precincts of autonomous architectural set pieces arranged around parking lots and communal services, and are situated at the most accessible points of the metropolitan road network.

(José María Eaquiaga (November-December 1998). "The City: Folds and Pieces". AV Monographs 74: 4–11.)