Rooting out mixed use: Revisiting the original rationales

Mixed use has become one of the most popular principles of contemporary urban planning. In the United States, its benefits are so commonly extolled that it is easy to forget that some hundred years ago, US experts advocated the opposite-the rooting out of mixed use from cities-with the same passion that we argue for it today. This paper reviews early 20th-century discourses on the perceived harms of mixed use. These discourses paved the way for land-use separation to become a key tenet of 20th-century US municipal regulation. Understanding the case against mixed use made by our predecessors calls into question the basic assumptions we inherited from them.