Metro Center Revitalization

March 2024

Following presentations and a work session with City Council, along with our well-attended public meeting with members of our residential and workforce communities, the City of Dublin and Sasaki are using the learnings from the engagement opportunities to work through design and drafting concepts, including early transportation and market analysis. We look forward to sharing those concepts with the public later this summer.

Jan. 30 Public Meeting

More than 140 community members attended the “Metro Center Revitalization” meeting on Jan. 30. Following a panel discussion, attendees visited six engagement stations to share their thoughts for the future of Metro Center. If you missed the meeting, we have opportunities to provide your input. Listen Now.

Background

Office space within the City of Dublin is among the most desirable in Central Ohio. Dublin offers an ideal environment for businesses to grow, thrive and innovate. To remain competitive, the City has been studying the existing conditions, market conditions, stakeholder requirements and effects of the changing workspace demands. Business retention and attraction is vital to our community’s corporate income tax base, which funds City services, quality infrastructure and community amenities.

Today, shifting office and employment demographics are re-shaping suburbs and urban areas. One of Dublin City Council’s goals is “Realize the Metro Center Revitalization Vision,” and guide a refresh of the area to meet the needs of a 21^st century global city of choice like Dublin. The Metro Place visioning process, completed in 2021, called for a more diverse mix of offices along with unique places to live, work and enjoy. As people come back to work in offices – they want mixed-use, walkable environments with amenities such as restaurants, gyms, stores and entertainment.

Metro Center, located southeast of the I-270 and US-33 interchange, is part of the adopted Dublin Corporate Area Plan (DCAP) in 2018, which recommends repositioning “legacy” office sites for success by encouraging new investment, as well as reinvestment in existing buildings. The DCAP focuses on creating a walkable, mixed-use environment and establishing a strategy to refresh the Frantz Road streetscape.

To help realize a revitalized vision for Metro Center, the City engaged a team of consultants led by Sasaki, a design firm with global expertise in urban design, landscape architecture, ecology and civil engineering, to transform Metro Center into an active and desirable community and employment center for the City of Dublin with a broad range of uses, open space configurations and easy access for all. This plan will allow Metro Center to become a place to get to, rather than merely pass through, and a destination for top-notch talent and a wide range of Dubliners to live, work, play and create.

Project Objectives

A successful project will achieve the following objectives: Working to revitalize Metro Center

• Build upon, not duplicate work from past initiatives for Metro Center and the Dublin Corporate Area.
• Refine the vision of a distinct identity and sense of place for the district which replicates the success of Bridge Park but does not duplicate its character.
• Identify public infrastructure improvements which contribute to an urban design framework.
• Identify sites best positioned to establish a development “beach head’ and create catalytic change.
• Identify potential strategic implementation partnerships.

Schedule

This project is expected to be completed in August 2024 with important milestones throughout the process.