Recovering the Lost Art of Mixed-Use Development

The most successful and resilient development patterns include a mix of land “uses”—in other words, it allows residential units, offices, retail, restaurants, and the like to exist in close proximity to each other. A variety of uses, regardless of what form they take, creates a natural diversity within a community or neighborhood that meets the daily and weekly needs of residents. This mix also diversifies the economy so that the community is not reliant on one single use of land, but a balance of uses.

For the past 80 years, modern zoning regulations have been written and implemented with almost the sole focus of separating uses. Sometimes, the intention behind this is good—you wouldn’t want a slaughterhouse located right next to a hospital, for example. Other times, however, these regulations have been used to maintain segregation and fuel racism. The eradication of mixed-use development through regulation has resulted in a modern built environment full of single uses of land, segregated by distance. We now have an entire generation that has never experienced, built, or regulated mixed-use development, and thus we have lost it as an art.

Prior to the adoption of modern zoning regulations, a mix of uses was the standard in development. For thousands of years, mixed-use development was the default and common practice in cities and towns. We can see this within ancient archeological sites and we can experience this in our historic downtowns. Putting businesses and homes closer together made for greater efficiency in people’s daily lives, and it provided stability within a local economy. It was once expected that you would be able to work, live, and meet routine needs, within relative proximity.

Our lives in the modern city require each and every one of us to visit many different single-use developments throughout the week. We live in a house or apartment, which is a residential unit. We go to work in an office, which is a commercial use, or we work in a factory—an industrial use. We shop in a grocery, which is a retail use, or we eat dinner out, which is a restaurant use. Unfortunately, these places are spread out, requiring us to use cars just to get to them.

The separation of uses creates a slippery slope, as each use is further defined and then separated. For example, an office and a retail store are both commercial uses. The construction techniques for these uses are relatively the same, and therefore these uses are classified by a building official through the respective building code as the same.

However, for planners, these uses may be further subdivided and separated through additional regulations. The most notorious of these regulations are parking rates, which can drastically vary for an office versus a retail store. Other regulations may include wider or greater landscape buffers where an office use may require a 10-foot landscape buffer from a residential district, but a retail use may require a 20-foot landscape buffer. These zoning performance standards assume that an office will forever be an office and a retail store will forever be a retail store. The result is single-use development without the ability to adapt over time.

A mixed-use development pattern is unfamiliar to the millions who live within single-use subdivisions or in communities that have adopted zoning regulations that regulate the proximity of uses. As we rediscover how to build sustainable and lasting cities and towns, we must reintroduce the principles of traditional development patterns.

I find it easier to understand the built world if I can break it down to smaller parts or organize repetitive patterns. Each of these patterns have unique qualities based on scale, form, and proximity. I have found that mixed-use development patterns can be organized into three basic forms: neighborhood, street, and building.

Mixed-use neighborhoods include a mix of land uses within a geographic area. The uses are mixed within the block and the street. (Source: Author.)

Neighborhood

Mixed-use neighborhoods are development patterns that prioritize the pedestrian, include a variety of building forms, and include multiple uses. A mixed-use neighborhood is one where residents could walk to all of their daily and possibly weekly activities. Mixed-use neighborhoods may separate different uses into different buildings, but they do not restrict the proximity of uses along the street.

These are the places that have the corner store or office uses embedded within the residential neighborhood. These are also the places that have main streets that transition from retail stores to residential uses. In all cases, mixed-use neighborhoods include a mix of residential and commercial uses.

Planners describe mixed-use neighborhoods as fitting a range of destinations and uses into a “pedestrian shed.” This term refers to the distance that people are comfortable walking before they decide to get into a car. The radius of the pedestrian shed varies greatly based on the walking experience (how comfortable, varied, and safe it is) and the mix of uses. It can be as little as a five-minute walk, or it can be larger in a place where the average tolerance for walking to get places is higher. More recently, the concept of the 15-minute city has been broadly popularized.

A mixed-use street has a mix of uses along a street. The street may be composed of single-use buildings located closely together on a street. (Source: Author.)

Street 

Mixed-use streets are streets with a linear pattern of buildings in close proximity that include a mix of uses. This linear pattern is walkable, with ground-floor uses that face or front onto a central street. For purposes of illustration, a mixed-use street would be commonly described by planners as a “main street.”

Mixed-use streets are composed of multiple buildings that may all be single-use structures. This pattern may have ground-floor active commercial uses that can be shops or offices, with residential units above. This pattern may also be a collection of single-use buildings where single-story retail buildings are next to multi-unit or single-unit residential buildings. The composition of these patterns results in a vibrant mix of uses along the street, creating a lively atmosphere. 

Mixed-use streets are common where development has occurred slowly over time, where the community may have once been connected by transit to a larger commercial center, or where the demand for commercial space was met by infill or as an accessory use. Mixed-use streets may be tidy and orderly or very chaotic.  

Mixed-use buildings integrate different uses within a single structure. These uses may be stacked or located all on a single floor. (Source: Author.)

Building

Mixed-use buildings are single structures that include two or more different uses. For purposes of illustration, the iconic American mixed-use building includes the ground floor shop front with 1–2 stories of apartments above. Traditional cities have a very wide variety of mixed-use buildings, where the mix of uses may be distributed through the city. 

A mixed-use building does not have to include a residential component to be mixed-use. There are an infinite number of non-residential uses that could be mixed in these buildings—for instance, ground-floor retail with offices above. 

Mixed-use buildings come in infinite combinations and can be located anywhere within a neighborhood or along the street. They may be small in scale, such as a live–work unit, or large, such as an apartment tower with ground-floor retail. 

Strong towns require a balance and composition of mixed-use neighborhoods, streets, and buildings. This variety meets demands for daily needs (like shopping for groceries) and for finding housing, all within proximity of each other. Mixed use is essential to the art of town building, but it’s not intuitive to many Americans, including planners and elected officials, who have lived their whole life in a world in which it is the rare exception. We need to recover this art.

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