Themes in 2020: “Right-Sizing” and Other Trends Impacting Mixed-Use Development

By John Rufo

As we turn to the last page of the calendar and anticipate the year ahead, it’s interesting to imagine the themes that may impact the design in the projects we will help shape in 2020. It’s been a year of pre-election candidate vetting, of potential constitutional crisis, of interesting proposals to fight the national and global housing crisis, and of growing voices in the effort to put the common good ahead of our divisive dialogue and intractable differences. The role of designers, one might say, is to create tangible responses to nascent ideas, in dialogue with current trends to understand how their implementation might affect a community. Three interrelated issues that we will be thinking about in 2020 are right-sizing, the evolving retail ground plane and place-making as a kind of invitation to community healing.

Right Sizing

One recurring and impactful topic that has gotten a lot of traction in recent months is “Right Sizing”. In Newton, where two very large mixed-use projects, Northland and Riverside, are going through approvals, the idea of “right-sizing” has spawned a vigorous and passionate dialogue emanating from local neighborhood groups and involving city leaders, developers and the design community. In short, what a developer often sees as the right density to make a large and complicated project viably “pencil”, a neighborhood group might see as too large and therefore increasing traffic, impacting schools and ultimately transforming the environs in a way that is, in their opinion, unpalatable and a threat to an established quality of life.

While their fears are understandable, the harder more nuanced conversation addresses not only size and traffic, but it also considers providing more housing options, creating a walkable 24/7 public realm, and finding in development proposals the ability to create robust and community-focused amenities such as open space systems linking such community benefits as walking trails and public transportation. While the role of Form + Place on the seam of the public and private interface is often to objectively evaluate/design the public realm, it can’t be ignored that there is a tangible connection between density and deliverable amenities that help communities make progress on issues like affordable housing, sustainability, diversity and shared equitable public places. While down-sizing projects as they move through the approvals process may quell people’s fears, a squandered opportunity to provide needed public benefits may be a real result of the process.

The Evolving Ground Plane

In our cities and towns there is, as you will surely have heard, a “Retail Apocalypse” unfolding that is reshaping our neighborhoods and impacting the evolution of retail and mixed-use development. The “ground plane”, as architects like to call it, is shifting. Viable retail uses to fit all contexts can be hard to come by, there are only so many hip third-place cafes to go around, and banks and nail salons are now vilified as the scourge of dynamic street life. People want a vibrant, shoppable streetscape, but in practice it’s getting harder and harder for developers and building owners to deliver. Pop-Up shops have emerged as one way of at least temporarily solving this problem, but the potential in curated pop-up offerings seems to be misunderstood by the public and those not intimately familiar with leasing and development of ground floor commercial space. Pop-up consultants like Up Next https://poppingupnext.com/ and Storefront https://www.thestorefront.com/ focus on curated, gallery-like environments that provide opportunities for new businesses to experiment with “bricks and mortar” while providing developers and building owners a way of branding and bridging transitional phases of larger projects and small neighborhoods.

As projects are “right-sized”, one of the inevitable results of a smaller tighter pro-forma is less ability to underwrite the inclusion of smaller local retailers with larger “credit tenants”. In response to this trend the inclusion of “flexible commercial space” is starting to be more common in development proposals and should be considered by cities and towns as a viable zoning mechanism to incentivize active ground floor uses. If there isn’t currently a retail market for a particular project or if there simply is not the critical mass needed to support a diverse range of tenant types, a developer could set aside a certain percentage of ground floor space for temporary use as office space, community space or possibly otherwise restricted uses such as a maker space or live-work space. As this trend evolves it will be interesting to explore the notion of public access and community engagement that these kinds of spaces might catalyze.

Place-Making as Community Healing

Place-making is verging on being an overused term these days. But doing a deeper and wider dive into the various manifestations of any trend can reveal why certain subjects hold on and continue to be relevant in the dialogue linking design and civic engagement. In this blog over the past two years we’ve written about place-making being something as small and intimate as the way you arrange your desk, to the art you hang on the wall, to the types of chairs selected for a common space or outdoor café, to the large-scale shaping of buildings and public spaces.

But as we move forward into an election year and we confront the need for true dialogue and debate of real issues, we wonder about the context of those conversations and how creative place-making might shape public discourse. Maybe the answer is really no different from understanding that it happens across a variety of scales. Maybe because of our wealth of differences as well as the values we hold in common, it’s important to acknowledge that all spaces have the potential to be the setting for community dialogue. From living rooms and kitchen tables, to conference rooms and water coolers, from park side benches to community gazebos and amphitheaters, the spaces we design and help shape can sponsor the most important conversations we have. With this in mind, it seems incumbent upon the proponents and designers of a large mixed-use development to provide spaces that foster active as well as passive engagement, speech making as well as concert listening, people watching as well as people engaging.

In 2020, the myriad trends and threads of 2019 will carry forward and either gain momentum or give way to new ideas. Amid this evolving landscape, we at Form + Place believe our role is to provide a client and community-focused process that without exception:

·        Articulates a vision for our clients

·        Allows our clients to build community inside and outside of the building walls

·        Creates buildings that support our client’s mission

·        And creates places that engage community and define paths to connectivity