#TIL: Living Working Playing the right way
By Jagriti Arora
In simple terms, the ‘Live Work Play’ communities can be understood as communities where the inhabitants go on with their daily activities, i.e. living, working and playing in a smaller area. This concept is embodied in the “Mixed Use Development” concept. Globally, mixed-use projects have been implemented in various cities. In India, Shantiniketan by Prestige group in Bengaluru, Nirmal Lifestyle Mall and Marketcity project in Mumbai, Marg Junction in Chennai, Worldmark in Delhi and Brahma Athena in Gurgaon are some examples of mixed-use developments. One needn’t look too far. Historically, cities were planned to mixed-land-use principles.
After the advent of cars, city planners started dividing their cities into different zones, namely residential, commercial, industrial, institutional etc. These zones were segregated from each other for ease of functioning and distribution of resources. With the passage of time, however, the urban sprawl started yielding unanticipated side-effects, such as increased Vehicle Kilometer Travelled (VKT), increased energy consumption, increased public service costs and loss of inefficient provision of infrastructure and land. As a response, mixed-use developments started to emerge.
These developments made the communities more walkable and held remedies to many other challenges. Indian cities struggle with excessive demand for transportation and infrastructure. Providing the aforesaid services is only a temporary solution. Such projects helped curb the demand itself, pushing cities to address their problems more sustainably. They further helped reduce the demand for motorability by increasing walkability and bringing together daily activities. They also helped transform the inevitable isolation citizens feel by increasing the probability of more face-to-face interactions and, thereby, supported the development of social and knowledge capital. Yet, through the rose tinted glasses, all the red flags just look like flags.
In other words, positivist research might not reveal the entire picture of mixed use developments. These developments bring their own set of challenges. By their very nature, mixed use developments involve multiple stakeholders. Reconciling their interests becomes a challenge. Residential and commercial users have different needs. While those inhabiting residential areas would want a more secure setting that limits the entry of outsiders, users of commercial areas would want to attract as many people as possible. Additionally, lease cycles for residential areas is about 12 months, while the rent cycle for commercial setups tends to be about 3 years to 5 years. Managing the ownership tenure, thus, becomes difficult to manage. With the pains of assembling land parcels and negotiating with zoning regulations, delivery of mixed-land use takes longer than the single-use projects. Finally, the development finance for mixed use projects is limited since these projects are deemed to be of higher risk profiles by the financiers.
There’s a need for further research to make mixed-use projects more viable and single-use projects more sustainable. Perhaps the answer to India’s urban problems could be a mix of mixed land use and single-use projects. One can only hope that the answers don’t reveal themselves after trial and error at big irreversible scales.
Today I learnt (TIL) is a weekly series by OMI that brings you interesting nuggets of information that you didn’t know you needed.
