Mixed Use
Doing some work on specific ways to combine social and commercial uses in a web project yesterday sent me into making comparisons to real estate development yet again.
Mixed use is a term used by urban planners to identify zoning that permits a combination of both commercial and residential uses. As a modern concept, it came into fashion in response to problems of scale inadvertently created as a result of booming population, prosperity and growth following WWII. Huge concrete towers and canyons, especially of office space (dead at night), and subsidized housing (inadvertently planned ghettoes) exacerbated many urban problems.
Combining businesses with homes in zoning for development was previously done on a more grass roots human level, and the traditional arrangement of businesses on major streets backed by residential enclaves behind them worked perfectly well in the old small town model, but didn’t translate well with economies of scale or high density development.
Toronto has avoided many of the urban decay problems faced by North American cities largely due to one man. David Crombie, for whom I have tremendous personal respect and admiration, was elected to our City Council in 1970, and became Mayor in 1972, serving 3 terms before leaving for Federal politics. He was known in Toronto as ‘the Tiny Perfect Mayor’, and could have continued in or returned to that office for many years afterward almost effortlessly based on his deserved popularity.
One of his first acts as mayor, however, stunning the local financial and development community, was to announce a total moratorium on development. His intent was to call a ‘time out’, reassess, and introduce the concept of mixed use. Once the money men had finished hyperventilating and dismounted from their ‘end of the world’ soapboxes, everyone naturally went back to work, planning and building for profit, and learning to adapt to the new zoning rules.
The first large mixed use development, ManuLife Center, was not an unqualified success. In 20/20 hindsight, it is obvious that the layout of the complex, in attempting to insulate each of the 3 use elements (office, retail, and residential) from one another, undermined the theoretic principle of interactivity on which mixed use was based. Planning successful major urban real estate developments is as much about understanding and directing traffic flow as anything else, and the abrupt delineations between use areas in the ManuLife project translated into dead ends that halted traffic.
Looking at Toronto today, though, especially now that individual home office use in urban areas is a common reality, we can recognize the great contribution David made to our city in the area of urban development. We never did build another St. James Town, for example.
How does all this relate to a web project?
The barriers we maintain in our society, between personal space, marketplaces, and business are based on a balance between the benefits and hindrances that each offers the other. Some of these considerations cease to exist when physical contact is removed, but we are also creatures of habit, so our behavior patterns are not going to change overnight. Despite the fact that the virtual world can and will offer seamless integration of uses, to our great benefit, we still plan today’s successful site for the way users will actually behave today. These are also difficult new concepts to conceptualize to the average person, who wants the elevator pitch as much as VC investors do.
What is this new site for?
A. To share your pictures with family and with old and new friends. Got it!
B. To enable personal, hobbyist, commercial trading (and more) activities in hub communities of like-minded people. Huh?
Re-reading B above, I see in my memory the baffled looks on real estate developers’ faces in the 1970s, whose conceptions of urban landscapes then did not envisage, for example, today’s St. Lawrence neighborhood, although David did.
The idealistic vision central to the concept of mixed use in urban planning, however, is achievable in the virtual world of the future in a way that is hasn’t been in the bricks and mortar world. Even better, or perhaps essential, is that via this new world, mixed use can be developed in a user interactive organic manner.
How cool is that?
October 9th, 2006 at 8:55 pm
Vera, I just came to your blog through Micropersuasion — I really enjoyed your tone and what you write there. I’ve been a whole brain person my whole life, always thinking in terms of and/and; perhaps the result of an Italian education. I love your explanation of web site option “B”.
We might add that extra efforts will go into building something that people will connect into by skips and dips — and sometimes stay a while.
October 10th, 2006 at 4:42 am
Hi, Valeria. Thank you for the compliment. It’s a pleasure to meet someone who isn’t baffled by ‘B’.
There are definitely great new things on the web, but I find most of them very limited. Here we blog. There we chat. Over there we share favorites, and on yet another site information. Later we can wander around and shop. Each one of us is doing this on the computer alone without interaction. I know there’s a better way.
Skips and dips is great, and if it’s really your kind of place and community you’ll be creating relationships and contributing. I believe the stay awhile part comes when you’ve something and someone to care about beyond words on a screen.
Vera