Innovation Park in Albuquerque, NM

Innovation Park is the mixed-use district inside Mesa del Sol, the master-planned community on Albuquerque's southeast mesa between Interstate 25 and Kirtland Air Force Base, a few miles from downtown and the Sunport. Mesa del Sol broke ground in 2005 under master developer Forest City Enterprises, and this part of it grew around the Aperture Center, Antoine Predock's LEED-certified town center of shops and offices. Netflix put its studio campus on the same ground, tracts platted for industrial, office, retail and residential use, so single-family blocks sit alongside soundstages and workplaces rather than apart from them.

Mesa del Sol was laid out as a forty-year build. Forest City Enterprises won the development bid in 2002 and broke ground in 2005; residential phases followed around 2011, then slowed after a 2015 state audit found the project in financial trouble. MDS Investments leads the development now, and Innovation Park is where the commercial and industrial tracts were platted and served with utility infrastructure ahead of the buildings that would use them.

The master plan reserves a wide band of the mesa for parks and open space, and the surrounding land does the rest of the work: Kirtland Air Force Base wraps the north and east, Isleta Pueblo land lies south, and the Sunport runs along the northwestern edge. Interstate 25 forms the western side, with a Mesa del Sol Boulevard interchange among the access projects on the books. University Boulevard and Stryker Road carry local traffic past the Aperture Center, and an international school and a soccer stadium round out what the district has drawn in besides work.