Resiliency in Real Estate:
Fine-Grained Urbanism and Small Footprint Buildings​

This paper assumes the benefits of dense, mixed-use, walkable urbanism and agglomeration economics. Rather than debating the merits of different densities, this paper instead looks at different ways to achieve the same density. On one hand, a city or neighborhood can be comprised of large block-wide buildings. This is coarse-grained urbanism. On the other hand, a city or neighborhood can be comprised of narrower, but similarly dense, row buildings. This is fine-grained urbanism. The place, or portfolio, of row buildings is more resilient due to a greater level of diversification and incrementalism among physical constructs and their attributes, management entities, users, uses, destinations per block, financial structures, time and seasonality of use, and sudden changes to any of the above.

A summary of this paper was published in the NYU Schack Student Journal.

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