About Mixed-Use
Development Projects

Mixed-use project development generally refers to projects that integrate different land uses (building types) such as retail stores, restaurants, residences, civic buildings, offices and parks within a defined area - typically a single land parcel.

Mixed-use developments have potentially unique advantages for tne end-users that occupy the facility, due to the promise of a more varied and satisfying urban experience that comes with mixed-use design.

The desire for a more interesting urban fabric is to a great extent a result of that uniquely American invention - the American suburb. With the suburb came an entirely new culture: the tract house, the drive- in movie, the drive-in restaurant, the strip shopping center, the regional shopping center, the office park. Downtowns, town squares, districts, and neighborhoods of the American city - each of which were already of mixed-use nature by their very definition - were eclipsed by an environment where notions of progress and desirable newness celebrated the prevailing values of convenience, simplicity, and privatization. The complex layering of the traditional city - and the city's traditional forms - gave way to suburbia, to linear experiences of unrelated and segregated uses. On an architect's land use plan - these became distinct planning bubbles or enclaves.

This suburban development pattern constituted an environmental loss that is rarely talked about - the experiential loss. The experiential loss may be added to the economic loss experienced by city's when new malls saturated the suburban landscape, along all those new transit nodes created by the U.S. interstate highway system.

The suburban fabric has been comprised of repetitive, anonymous, prototypical components arranged in groupings of similar use. Suburban contextual concerns have always and only been functional ones: relationships of streets, commercial strips, highways, freeways, and malls. This pattern of development fostered one of the great public-private engineering and development programs in human history: the creation of American suburbia. However, what was created lacked a soul.

Mixed-use development projects, and the character of the built environment that they bring, provide almost a nostalgic environment of urban character that may be entirely lacking in many communities. The best of the new mixed-use projects are not inward, insular projects, but catalyst projects that help to knit with their surroundings and provide the connections and edges that foster further urban (and suburban) revitalization and redevelopment.

As well, mixed-use developments have uniquely complicated traffic, shared vs. dedicated parking (for some uses), and activity periods, that change with daypart, and weekpart. Financing is more complex as mixed-use projects are more integrated - as lenders find it difficult to underwrite for risk and loan packaging.