"Omni-Use": The Next Thing in Mixed-Use Development

The next wave in urban master-planning and design is "omni-use." The days of putting housing on top of a strip mall and calling it mixed-use are rapidly coming to an end.

True urban development brings a wide mix of uses together, including retail, restaurant-bars, hotels, offices, stadia, movie theaters, housing, creative live/work, light industrial and even schools, creating what we have termed as "Omni-Use."

Here at MVE, we are assisting the City of Anaheim in master planning the massive 50-acre Five Seven Centrum project, an omni-use redevelopment in the emerging "Platinum Triangle" neighborhood, next to Angel's Stadium and served by mass transit.

Five Seven Centrum recreates the elements that make the world's greatest cities enjoyable places to live and visit-and that means street scenes that are inviting and compel citizens and visitors alike to stroll, to sample streetside vendors, to partake of a show or ball game. The plan is to create streets at Five Seven Centrum that make for old-fashioned people-watching, rife with good meeting spots at coffee shops, restaurants or pubs.

Key ingredients in the Five Seven Centrum project are the hotels-two of them. It is anticipated that the two new hotels will be boutique, select-service inns that not only provide dining and nightlife opportunities to guests and residents, but add foot traffic to the wider Platinum Triangle, a zone formerly defined by nondescript warehouses.

Unfortunately, hotels are often overlooked in larger, mixed-use centers or neighborhoods. With their revolving cadres of new street denizens and customers and their entertainment venues-hip restaurants, lounges, bars and luxury spas-hotels can continuously enliven malls and the street scene. Especially in tourist cities, hotel guests can be spenders and revelers, eager for nightlife and well-received by retailers.

In the United States, excellent examples of thriving mixed-use zones with hotels include the Cocowalk in Coconut Grove, Florida; Times Square, New York City; and Cherry Creek Mall and neighborhood, Denver.

It is worth pondering that downtown stadiums, mixed-use structures and hotels were urban realities in the Colosseum environs of Rome, nearly 2,000 years ago. The Romans even ate "fast-food" from sidewalk vendors, purveyors of hot cauldrons of soup. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

Of course, traditional development patterns in older U.S. cities featured urban stadia and grand hotels, and housing cheek-by-jowl to light industrial, retailers and often exuberant movie palaces or theaters. It was only after World War II, with the flight to suburbia by freeway, that our traditional cities began to splinter. The introduction in the 1960s of "urban renewal," with its unforgivably dull single-use districts, marked the nadir of true city development.

Happily, today city planners recognize the need for omni-use developments in their cores, served by mass transit and welcoming of visitors. Urban stadia, from Baltimore to San Diego to Anaheim, are coming back.

For all of the changes that have taken place in urban technologies, the very human needs of travelers and locals alike-for habitation, sustenance, business opportunities, camaraderie and entertainment, in close proximity-remain the same.

As architects or city planners, we thwart those human needs at our own peril, as we plan and develop mixed-use-omni-use, that is-neighborhoods in the cities of our future.