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over what now exists.
Businesses have been moving out of the city centre. Anyone who can find, for example, a pure residential property along Enterprise Road between the city centre and Chisipite must be using a time machine.
Large swathes of Belgravia, southern and eastern Avondale, Eastlea and Belvedere have been converted to offices, legally but often with poor planning. And illegal office conversions abound.
So far as rates are concerned, the assumption, increasingly untenable, is that properties in these areas are considered residential, and so pay cheaper rates, unless the contrary is proved.
The city planners talk about converting the rates to commercial scales. We hope this means that owners will pay commercial rates, unless they can prove the property is purely residential.
This just shifts the burden of proof through 180 degrees, but does not punish those who want to continue living in these areas.
And it is vital that people continue living in these areas. We cannot see thousands of homes converted, wily nilly and without approved conversion plans, into offices and shops. It needs to be recognised, and stressed, that Harare is finally growing up and accepting multi-use zoning and a wide variety of land use in a single city block.
It is peculiarly old-fashioned, and a relic of simplistic planning in the middle decades of the 20th century, that residential and commercial uses must be as far apart as planners can manage.
And even then, this heresy only really was accepted in the English-speaking world, and not even universally there.
Anyone visiting older cities quickly finds that multi-use is not just an accepted way of life, but adds to the vibrancy of a city and its neighbourhoods.
Outside the serious inner core of the city, say the bottom end of Manhattan in New York, it is easy to find shops, restaurants, offices and homes sharing the same city blocks.
Often the shops will be on the ground floors, offices above them and flats in the higher stories.
“Living over the shop” was a phrase that had a precise meaning for most retailers until very recent decades.
Now architects are being encouraged to build multi-use developments. This is, for example, at long last bringing people back to live in the old City of London, once abandoned to banks.
Developers like Donald Trump have embraced the ideal, although they usually top off the residential floors of the development with an ultimate luxury multi-floor penthouse.
The sort of do-it-yourself conversion we have seen in Harare gives us the worse of all worlds: ribbon development, substandard offices, illegal shops, loss of living area, and a degradation of residential properties nearby.
It does not have to be like that. We can continue to encourage the preservation of some architectural gems, but a lot of the new area needs more radical redevelopment so that it can, and will, become a series of multi-use neighbourhoods, with all the richness and convenience that can bring.
This is why rezoning is useless and even harmful without a far more detailed, and far more liberal, set of local plans and a set of council planning policies and rate incentives that will encourage growth and development along a far more human path than we have seen so far.
Let us remember that the Kopje was, until the 1970s, a combined residential and commercial area and let us learn some lessons about how not to do it.
Online Reporter