I may be overlooking a downside but it always seemed obvious to me office and apartment buildings should be intermixed. Separating living, shopping and office into different zones always felt strikingly absurd. I am happy to live in a place where it's not the case so my office building is less than 15 minutes walking from my home, as well as a supermarket, a swimming pool, a forest, a university and everything else one can imagine wanting in their life.
Here in Oslo, the mixed-use Vertikalen[1][2] recently officially opened. Ground floor is a cafeteria and a restaurant, followed by a several floors of offices, and the rest above is all residential apartments.
While the looks can be argued, the mixed-use seems like an interesting idea. Not aware of too many other such buildings here, so will be interesting to see how it fares.
American cities have developments like this now (Baltimore and Philly for example), but it requires acquiring gentrifiable land/buildings, the capital to renovate them, and demand to pull in the middle-class hipsters to live there.
You’re right. What I’ve heard is that this is basically another area with misaligned incentives: for any given project offices are cheaper to build, have fewer permitting concerns, and cheaper to manage (a few big commercial clients versus hundreds of renters), and cities may prefer them if they’re tight on capacity for things like schools – but if everyone does that, your city is unappealing and excessively exposed to the business health of a few companies or industries.
Separation does not happen organically. Rich people and governments are in charge of city planning and they make wrong decisions based on making profits.
In city where I live some rich dude contributed to our city governor’s campaign or something. Now governor has to “return the favor” by relocating thousands of government employees from downtown area which is close to a lot of people’s homes to outskirts of the city where nobody lives and where that rich dude owns office space for rent.
It's doesn't happen organically. It is usually designed by city planners (or equivalent functions depending on the city). It makes most sense to have mixture of residential and commercial buildings in the same area so that there is no foot traffic vacuum depending on the time of the day. Foot traffic vacuum creates space for potential crimes.
(e.g, if you separate commercial and residential, the commercial area will be more likely crime ridden at night and residential area will be more prone to crime during the day).
