What do collapsing bridges in Minneapolis and mixed use have in common? If you answer "nothing" you are likely to have a lot of company. On the other hand, if you answer "everything" you will be far closer to the truth.

As often said, everything is about money. And bridges and other infrastructure are all about money for sure. Lots of it, and often not enough. That is true for other areas too: health care, housing, energy, open space, recreation... you name it. We are rapidly approaching the time when the loss of cheap oil and other factors will make money even more scarce. Particularly for things that society really needs, like bridges and infrastructure. You can see this in the current gridlock in   the Illinois legislature and elsewhere. There just isn’t enough money! The pressure to find and do more with what we have is becoming intense. And when the impacts of the loss of cheap oil kick in, it will be with a white heat!

So, how can we make the future more affordable? This is where mixed use comes in.

This may seem a reach, but some serious thought may change your mind. Relatively intense, compact mixed use in the form of well designed downtowns, village centers and similar concentrated development is essential to reducing costs and saving money in infrastructure and in virtually every other way related to the way we live. For over the past forty years studies have shown that this is true.

We must make more areas in our cities and regions more intense, compact and accessible. We must use a pattern that is older than civilization but which we have largely ignored for the past fifty years, at least in the U. S. This pattern is largely based on walking and must result in areas that are accessible by all modes, with safe and comfortable internal movement systems that don’t depend on oil. And which include a wide range of mixed use with high levels of balance and self sufficiency in housing, job opportunities and services.

Over forty years ago efforts were made in many cities to define what this might mean. Dozens of regions established plans that called for creating compact, mixed use centers, often called diversified centers, activity centers, downtowns, etc., linked by good public transportation. And studies showed that regions developed to this pattern could save billions of dollars in the building of infrastructure and many more billions in its operation. And famous studies, such as the Costs of Sprawl, showed tremendous infrastructure savings of compact, well planned development.

But in the U. S., cheap oil, lack of knowledge or commitment and special interests and the obvious seeming attractions of auto use led to sprawl and disconnected single use developments that largely ignored both research findings and the successes of the past.

Recently and on a smaller, largely project scale, developers around the world have rediscovered mixed use. As a result, new projects are constantly being planned and proposed. Some of these are large enough and well enough conceived to produce the benefits anticipated, at least for their developers. Where they occur in well planned existing mixed use areas, such as village centers or downtowns, they can be expected to generate major benefits. Where they are very small or isolated or contain only a few "token" secondary uses, benefits will be limited. However, because of their good reputation, even projects with limited benefits are often welcomed and approved.

But the need and the potential benefit are great and we should encourage and support good mixed use development everywhere it is warranted. In areas the size of Chicago this could include a thousand or more mixed use centers or cores. These include granddaddy of them all, Downtown Chicago, to what the regional plan calls "hamlets." They could be anchored around anything with some attraction from smaller public, institutional or private activities, to major universities, hospitals, shopping centers and government, research or corporate headquarters or athletic, recreational or similar attractions.

Many downtowns in rural regions, too, could (and should) be targeted for this kind of growth and enrichment as well as in other urban regions throughout the world.

The opportunity and need are here to produce not only tremendous savings in infrastructure but also the improvement of living, employment and other cultural, social and environmental benefits for nearly everyone. Not to mention saving society from perhaps the worst bankruptcy we would have ever known.