Greening the Industrial District: Transforming Milwaukee’s Menomonee Valley from a Blighted Brownfield into a Sustainable Place to Work and Play

Abstract

Visions of a sustainable urban future don’t often include conventional manufacturing, given that it is blamed for causing many of our urban environmental ills in the first place. Decades of deindustrialization have resulted in poverty, joblessness, contamination, and visual blight, leading to a general sense that “rusty” old industry is a thing of the past, not the face of a city’s modern future. So it is common for local governments to reenvision a “greener” future for their brownfield districts that typically include parks, condos, retail shops, research centers, and white-collar office jobs, particularly in those locations near the downtown core that are ripe for “higher and better uses.”1 It would seem strange to some then that the city of Milwaukee chose to reindustrialize the Menomonee Valley, a 1,400-acre district of prime land located directly in the heart of the city and visible to all who drive over it on the main interstate. Even more surprising to some was the desire of many stakeholders to make this project a model of sustainability.