We will ensure that land uses are located on sites that meet their needs, work cohesively in their environments, and are served by appropriate transportation and infrastructure. While the LUTA concept encourages integration of uses, it does not suggest that any land use is appropriate anywhere. Commercial and industrial uses have particular needs for transportation, surrounding conditions, utilities, and visibility. Urban uses in general require water, wastewater, urban streets, and other infrastructure that can meet their demands for service. These individual requirements apply even in mixed-use environments. This makes specific criteria for location and design of individual uses especially important. Developers and builders will use these criteria as they select sites and design projects. Neighborhood residents will be reassured that potentially incompatible uses will be directed to appropriate sites. Approving groups will use criteria to evaluate the quality of development proposals and their compliance with the comprehensive plan. The tables shown on the right present a base for location and development criteria that should be refined and incorporated into new land use ordinances.
We will revise regulations to better protect residential uses from the negative effects of nearby non-residential uses. Traditional development ordinances attempt to shield residential uses from undesirable effects of adjacent uses by separation. Similar development types do tend to cluster together and keeping different uses apart sometimes works. However, use separation by itself produces inefficient and uninteresting development and often is not viewed as providing reliable protection. For example, Oklahoma City frequently uses Planned Unit Developments to control the details of conventional projects. However, the intention of PUDs was to provide flexibility for innovative development rather than inflexible controls on individual sites. Oklahoma City’s new directions in land use planning and regulation instead will create standards and guidelines by which different uses reinforce rather than harm each other.
Certain uses are incompatible and cannot easily be neighbors. The land use system should retain some primary use categories for these situations. But in most cases, transitional standards that encourage mixed-use development and directly control potential incompatibilities should create a more efficient and vital city.