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Mixed-Use Trade-Offs: How to Live and Work in a 'Compact City' Neighbourhood

This peer reviewed paper reports on detailed new empirical research undertaken as part of an Environment and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) funded project into the sustainability of 24 hour cities Vivacity 2020 (http://www.vivacity2020.co.uk/).

The paper’s underpinning research particularly focused on the generation of mixed use environments and was undertaken in collaboration with Bartlett, UCL (Alan Penn and Irini Perdikigianni ). However this paper specifically focuses on the everyday experiences of living and working in a changing mixed use urban neighbourhood.

Drawing on detailed land-use analysis, interviews with households and a survey of businesses, this paper challenges key compact city assumptions by suggesting that proximity of uses and integration within wider networks of urban physical, social and economic infrastructure are crucial for successful mixed neighbourhoods.

The reported case study is a post industrial inner city area of London, Clerkenwell, which has undergone major transformations in its landscapes of work and home since the late 1970s. Theoretically the paper revisits the concept of mixed-use as part of the compact city idea and examines the problems of implementing and delivering abstract visions of mixed-use in major developments and neighbourhood renewal programmes.

It presents the compromises or tradeoffs that residents and businesses have to make in order to sustain mixed-uses and identifies who currently does not benefit from mixed-use environments. The paper ends by questioning the point at which such trade-offs become unsustainable. As such this paper contributes to the theme of The Compact City Revisited selected for this volume of Built Environment.