Mixed use downtowns and centers have been essential to urban life for centuries. And up to fifty years ago every effort was made to assure that they existed, were easily accessible, walkable, compact and served our most important needs. But in the U. S., especially, cheap petroleum encouraged us to scatter functions widely across the landscape and abandon qualities of mixed use, economic and walkable access, energy saving, compactness and the many benefits they provide.

Understanding its value, a few vehemently argued the case for mixed use, recently making it popular, at least at the project level, with developers and public officials. But fifty years of scatter and sprawl vastly overwhelm what is being done. We need to return to the original and broad view of mixed use now!
                                            
A New Vision  

Fourteen years ago in his book New Visions for Metropolitan America, Anthony Downs said that  we must develop a new vision to deal with the issues emerging from this sprawl. He said: “...These flaws threaten to weaken the economic and social functioning of many metropolitan areas and therefore of the entire U. S. economy and society.” Even without accounting for the loss of oil, Downs makes a compelling case that we must make major changes in the way we build cities and regions to deal with these critical issues.

But he does not specifically recommend any one of the four options which he exhaustively explores. However, his analyses plainly say that the new vision must include higher housing densities, putting jobs and housing in close proximity and providing better public transit. These  conditions are major key stones of good mixed use.

The “New” Urgency

Three years ago James Kunstler focused on an overlooked reason for urgency in his book The Long Emergency .  Citing predicted sharp declines in available oil Kunstler said that “The salient fact about life in the decades ahead that it will become increasingly and intensely local and smaller in scale. It will do so by degrees as the amount of available cheap energy decreases and the global contest for it becomes more intense. The scale of all human enterprises will contract with the energy supply.....” Kunstler says that the environments that can best survive the loss of oil will need to look much like communities built before widespread auto use which often were mixed in use, walkable and relatively self contained –  conditions also anticipated in Down’s “new communities and green belt” future vision.

The Limited Response

There has not been any highly visible response to the alarms of Downs and Kunstler. About ten years ago the RPA (New York Regional Plan Association) started urging and helping communities give more attention to downtowns and centers as important focal points in its region. Vermont has had a program to help its communities improve their downtowns. San Diego recently initiated a program to further mixed use concepts in its communities and neighborhoods.

For over twenty years Vancouver has very successfully worked to apply mixed use principles to its downtown and other centers. And Chicago has updated its regional plan to once again assert the importance of downtowns and centers in the region and to identify nearly three hundred such centers. These range from downtown Chicago to “hamlets,” (but overlook hundreds more that should be recognized as potential  mixed use cores and lacks programs for implementation.)

The Urban Land Institute also started an informational program called “Transforming Suburban Shopping Centers,” aimed at making them more attractive, walkable and mixed in their use. It also has many publications on how to plan and build mixed use projects. But strong implementing measures are missing in all of these except for Vermont and Vancouver.

Oil Loss Deadly Serious

Even with the imminent loss of oil, almost no one appreciates how urgent it is that we return to mixed use principles and apply them vigorously and universally in both urban and rural regions. The challenge – and the opportunity – are enormous.  Organizing development into good mixed use downtowns, centers and activity areas should become major public policy at every level -- local, regional, state and nation. It should deal with any area that is or could be “mixed use” in the best meaning of the term, wherever located and whatever its current status – mixed or single use, public, private or institutional, existing or potential. 

Few people realize how imminent and painful the loss – or at least extreme increases in cost – of oil will be, much less the impact on our daily lives.  Or how soon! Predictions can not be precise. But the losses and the costs cannot be denied. The only response that has a chance of really being adequate is that of conservation. The only sure way to conserve enough is to organize our lives to reduce how much we travel, and how.  And the only way we can reduce travel significantly and maximize movement on foot and by transit is to create strong, mixed use downtowns, centers, villages and cores.  Areas that contain concentrations of housing and jobs together with many of the activities that serve them.

Major Pro-Mixed Use Policies Needed Now

It takes time to create strong, vital mixed use. We should be working hard to do this right now.

While Downs focused on guiding new development, our efforts to implement a new vision must be applied wherever progress toward productive mixed use can be made. This will be largely in modifying and adding to existing development. Some of this is happening now. But we need policies and programs to do much more. Some of these policies must be to simply provide or allow others to encourage, finance, provide incentives, subsidize or mandate improvements such as the following:

•    Helping existing downtowns, neighborhoods and village centers whether in cities, suburbs or country, become stronger and more complete as mixed use areas.
•    Add housing and supporting services to intensive employment and activity centers of any type, office, retail, government, health, sports, entertainment, resort, retirement, religious ,etc.
•    Provide public and convenience services wherever they are needed, such as: post offices and mailing services (even mail boxes) , government offices and services, pharmacies, news stands, community and senior centers, etc.
•    Add local public and commercial services and more housing choices in neighborhoods lacking them.
•    Add amenities, open space, historical, cultural  and recreational facilities in any areas where people congregate, live, work or shop.
•    Provide for rental of cars, cycles and other forms of travel to reduce need for auto ownership
•    Provide station and pick up locations for transit, ride sharing and other travel
•    Provide special pedestrian facilities such as under or over passes, shaded or weather protected pedestrian ways, escalators or other means of vertical movement, etc.
•    Provide and improve transit,  both for access and internal movement, where needed

Where public or other groups provide funds for transportation, economic development, affordable housing or other public purposes, mandate priority in their use to areas of mixed use.

Every community and every level of government and every industry, trade, professional, business or nonprofit organization should be contributing thought on this subject. Because Federal government attention is heavily preoccupied with events in the Middle East and issues such as health care, Social Security, tax reform and immigration, others, particularly the states and professional groups, need to take the lead in thinking about how we can achieve a massive redirection in how we build our cities. The need is so great and the opportunities so many that we cannot afford to be held back by the inaction of others.

For more, see: www.mixedusecores.com and www.kunstler.com