Nuances of Urban Density

Part 4 – The concept of mixed use

Anybody who has remotely read about or worked on the concept of land use or zoning will readily remember the traditional colors used in maps - yellows for residential uses, reds for retail and commercial, purple for industrial, blue - institutional and public facilities, green – recreational/open space, gray – industrial, etc. This is the norm for zoning maps. Zoning segregates land areas according to their use.

Well, not absolutely. It’s very seldom that you have an area with strictly only one kind of use – such as the Mactan Export Processing Zone (MEPZ) which has only one use. Or the Cebu International Port. A particular zone generally means one pre-dominant use. But they usually have intermingling – commercial areas have some houses; residential areas may have patches of commercial units. Zoning laws generally frown on these – very rigid on the pre-dominant use while allowing other uses under very strict circumstances. And even where prohibited, there are legal remedies for “variances” to be issued – another controversial issue which we may discuss in another write-up.

But that was before. Our discussion in our last three parts will lead us to the notion that strict zoning segregation is actually the cause of major transportation and traffic problems. Since people’s houses are lumped together, and jobs are congregated in another area, it created the need for commuting – i.e., creating trips from home-to-work in the morning and back in the evening. The bigger the sizes of the zones, and the more zones created, the more trips are generated. On the other hand, if we allow people to live close to their work areas, or allows jobs to be created where people live, people won’t have to commute farther and more often every day. In fact, ideally, we can create a situation where people just walk to their jobs.

That’s a perfect “ideal” which unfortunately, will remain such – “ideal” only, as reality may not allow that to happen. But it can still be an aspirational one, which cities could hope to achieve. And indeed, all over the world, cities have been slowly shifting to this possibility – the idea of mixed land uses. The idea of “new towns” was derived from this concept. There were complications, of course – one can’t correspond jobs and housing, so commuting, and congestion, are still largely created. But walkable townships and the concept of Transport-Oriented Development (TOD) largely rest on the mixed-use concept.

Sadly, in many countries, including ours, building expressways north and south has created single-use housing enclaves tens and even hundreds of kilometers from the central employment hubs of Metro Manila. This was okay for a while until the inevitable car-use growth kicked in. Now, many people there are looking at renting “dormitories” near their jobs because they hate the four-hour commutes back and forth which made their lives miserable. It’s happening in Metro Manila, and it’s happening in Metro Cebu. We need a paradigm shift if we are to have livable cities in the future. (To be continued)