A European feel in Oklahoma

The trend of inner-block development is very cool. This sweet little project, called Townsend in Edmond, Oklahoma, is breaking ground with two live-work units, 18 townhouses, and 13,000 square feet of commercial space on about an acre.

Austin Tunnell, founder of Building Culture & Apollo, which is leading this project, describes it on LinkedIn: “We call this ‘inner-block development.’ We aren’t just lining buildings along a street— we’re shaping a sequence of inner-block spaces. When you’re standing inside the project, you're in your own little world. This is where the magic happens. And it’s why we love ~3/4-acre+ sites: you can create a real, coherent ‘place.’ A pocket neighborhood with its own identity.”

The project is located in a walkable area of Edmond, but, like many cities, the streets are wide and handle a fair amount of traffic. Building new streets runs into the problem of standards that tend to make streets too wide. Inner-block development gets around that by not creating streets; rather, it creates intimate passages with the dimensions of narrow European or colonial streets. The townhouses front those spaces.

Tunnell’s firm is the architect, builder, and developer of the project, and looking to employ this strategy in other sites in the region. “Walkable places are the most valuable real estate over the long term. In walkable places, demand often increases with supply,” he says. “The more people move there, the more businesses and services the area can support—and the better it gets. We want to leverage this by focusing our efforts on several walkable districts across the OKC metro, building the undersupplied ‘missing ingredients’ of great walkable neighborhoods.” JJ Zanetta, a New Urbanist illustrator, worked on the renderings based on the Sketchup model.