Paths to mixed-use development: A case study of Southern Changping in Beijing, China

• We provide empirical support to the claimed benefits of mixed-use development.
• We tease out the mechanisms that ensure the effectiveness of mixed-use development.
• We demonstrate that besides urban form, development process also influences urban performance.

Mixed-use development has been widely accepted as a strategy in urban planning to address the problems resulted from the traditional zoning in the West, and it has also been increasingly adopted in many Chinese cities in recent decades with quite different results. However, few studies have provided empirical support to the claimed benefits of mixed-use development and little is known about the process to achieve the desired benefits of mixed-use. This paper reports our investigation of three typical urban development models commonly used in China – “top-down” centrally-controlled development model, “bottom-up” individual-dominant development model, and “bottom-up” collective-dominant development model. Using Southern Changping of Beijing as a case study, where the mixed-use development has been adopted in the past decade, we conduct a systematic evaluation of the three approaches and assess the impacts of mixed-use on urban development in Beijing. By conducting questionnaire analysis and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) to compare the job-housing pattern, career development of residents, sense of community and community vitality of the three models, the paper discovers that the community under “bottom-up” collective-dominant development model effectively achieved mixed-use development, while the “top-down” centrally-controlled development may lead to functional division and the “bottom-up” individual-dominant developed community ended up in disorder and chaos. Our findings indicate that under current policy framework and development trends in China, the “bottom-up” collective-dominant development model and social inclusion would be an effective way to achieving the intended goals of the mixed-use development.