Cities are being asked to do more with the land they already have. The developments that last will be the ones planned around how people actually live.
Most of the world's economic activity takes place in cities, and most of the buildings those cities will rely on a generation from now either exist already or will be built on land that is already urban. The future of development is therefore less a question of expansion than of how well existing places are renewed.
The limits of single use
The districts that have aged least gracefully tend to share a feature. They were built for one purpose. Office parks that empty at six, retail centres surrounded by parking, and residential tracts with nowhere to walk to all depend on a single pattern of life continuing unchanged. When that pattern shifts, the place has little to fall back on.
Mixed use development is the long standing answer to this, and it is returning to favour for practical reasons. A neighbourhood in which people live, work, shop, and spend their evenings is active for more hours of the day and is less exposed to the fortunes of any one tenant or industry.
Building for adaptation
No developer can predict how a building will be used in fifty years. What can be done is to build in a way that permits change: generous floor heights, flexible structures, and ground floors that can serve more than one kind of occupant. Adaptability is a form of durability.
Urban development is slow, expensive, and public in its consequences. The projects worth undertaking are those that a city would still be glad to have long after the people who built them have moved on.
Published by Aziz Enterprise as a Perspective. Perspectives are general commentary. They are not company announcements and are not investment, legal, or tax advice. See our Disclosures.