Redesign, redeploy, and re-envision urban corporate headquarters : Amazon's Seattle campus case study

Corporate headquarters have tremendous impacts on cities and the built environment. As companies expand, downsize, and adapt through the business cycles and industry transformations, the size of corporate workforce and real estate holdings are in constant flux, resulting in a dynamic urban system that continues to shape and reshape physical planning and urban morphologies of cities. This thesis focuses on corporate headquarters in an urban environment where the main campus is physically located in the downtown core or near the central business district. Using Amazon campus in Seattle as a case study, the research investigates past experiences in adaptive reuse of signature corporate headquarters in the US, explores Amazon growth and its impacts on urbanism, and develops a custom-built app that visualizes Amazon-occupied office space in Seattle to inform re-tenant and real estate disposition strategies in a futuristic scenario where Amazon shifts the activity center away from the downtown area. Local and regional planning agencies could potentially use this research as a framework for future economic resilience planning initiatives and dialogues.

Name thesis:degree_name

Master

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Urban Studies and Planning

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Jamawat, Jeff.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Brent Ryan.

• Urban Studies and Planning.
• Center for Real Estate. Program in Real Estate Development.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed, downloaded, or printed from this source but further reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/123958

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/123958