Listen to a room full of developers; you’d come away convinced mixed use is the saviour of the city.

So why do so many of them do it so badly?

Other than their own lack of imagination, the answer is that few have figured out how to do it. According to the current model of, say, your basic condo, people live in the tower above, work and shop in the podium below.

At street level, that translates into yet another Shoppers Drug Mart, a dry cleaner or a Starbucks — the usual suspects. “We’ve got a lot of bad mixed use,” veteran Toronto developer Gary Switzer said at the Land and Development Conference last week. “Residential architects can’t do retail, and retail architects . . .”

You get the idea.

There’s much truth in what Switzer said. Recreating a contemporary equivalent of those supremely flexible two- and three-storey buildings that have lined the streets of Toronto going back decades has proved tough. Naturally, condo owners are picky about who will occupy their ground floors. And, it turns out, they’re as deeply conservative as developers, who never saw a franchise they didn’t love.

Switzer, whose latest proposal is the 60-storey Massey Tower on the east side of Yonge, north of Queen, lamented the difficulties of the approval process, but also made an unexpected plea for more government regulation.

“If it weren’t for the location of (the Massey Tower),” he admitted, “we wouldn’t bother with it.

But he also suggested we need legislation to address the loss of “things we used to know how to do but have forgotten.” He was referring to architectural and city-building details such as minimum ceiling heights, entrances and stairwells, the sort of things that designers tend to overlook, but which are experienced by every user.

As real estate guru Barry Lyons made clear at the same session, “The past few years have been the golden age of growth in Toronto.”

Because of that pressure, he argued, “We now use land as if it’s a precious resource.”

He gave the example of a 75-storey tower — mixed-use, of course — under consideration for a triangular sliver of land at Lake Shore Blvd. and York St.

“A mix of uses is essential to what we’re selling,” declared Cadillac Fairview vice-president Finley McEwen. “You’re selling a lifestyle. We’re trying to undo a century of planning.”

He was referring to single-use zoning that created North American cities and suburbs as we know them today. “Postwar planning was all about separation of uses,” Switzer rightly noted. “It goes back to the modern movement. It was all about smells . . . and noise.”

“We live in a mixed-use culture,” asserted Remo Agostino of the Daniels Corp. “People are going back to wanting to live, work and play in the same area.”

Toronto’s acting chief planner, Gregg Lintern, also preached from the gospel of mixed use. “We’re all on board with the mixed-use agenda,” he confirmed. “We (the city) try to direct form and stay neutral on the uses that go in the form.”

So far, results have been, well, mixed. Ryerson University’s Ted Rogers School of Management, which shares its premises at Dundas and Bay with Canadian Tire and an above-ground parking garage, is an obvious success story. But in too many condo towers, podiums are generic and entirely predictable. Taking more than they give, they contribute little in the way of city building.

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Regardless, mixed use is the way to go. Whether we’re good at it or not, it’s what the city is all about.

Christopher Hume can be reached at chume@thestar.ca