Land uses are assigned or designated within a zonal system of land use management that allows for an efficient and orderly arrangement of compatible land uses, delivery of infrastructure (like EC for Emerging Community zones in City Plan (Brisbane City Council, 2014b)) and provide an interestingly diverse urban fabric that changes with the evolution of a place according to its needs. Zones that are compatible with each other work best if they deliver safety and security but also have cultural benefits and contribute to and positive living day to day.
Mixed uses in built up areas has been a tradition which can be found as early as Ancient Greek and European medieval cities. HOPSCA elements in Judge magazine 1895
Historically mixed use enclaves were not established with a set of predetermined criteria as we would find in today’s litigious framework in Queensland. In fact, the omission of controls outside of Medieval guild interests (for example) is what helps to create richly organic and ancient centres.
Following on, the trend of urbanisation has been occurring since cities have been seen as attractive places for opportunity, work or leisure. Today, our planning mechanisms seek to ensure developmental changes encourage sustainable places.
HOPSCA is a modern rendition of mixed use development to create an economic hub for a specific purpose at a very large scale, a city scale. HOPSCA requires a minimum active total population of 15,000 persons based on literature reviewed. Therefore one can see that the surrounding city population mist be considerable to support a HOPSCA proposal.
HOPSCA (also known as Urban Complex) is described as ‘a city within a city’ and is an acronym for Hotel, Offices, Parks, Shopping malls, Convention and Apartments. In order for HOPSCA to work it needs to be at the city scale being considerably larger than a master planned community and is discussed further in 2.4 Characteristics of a HOPSCA.