Whenever I visit a new city be it for business, for a site visit or for a conference, I like to spend at least some of my time exploring the place. I want to see where people actually live, where they get their morning chai, where they park, how far the pharmacy is from the apartment block, whether the street feels alive at 8am and again at 8pm or dead after office hours.

And what I have noticed, consistently, over the last five years in every city I visit be it either Mumbai, Hyderabad, Pune, Singapore is that the streets which feel genuinely alive are almost always the ones where the uses are mixed. Where the ground floor is a bakery or a clinic or a co-working space, and the floors above it are homes. Where the person buying groceries might live in the same complex as the person who runs the grocery store.

Where It Goes Wrong

When you separate where people sleep from where they work from where they shop, you create something that requires a vehicle to navigate and feels empty everywhere except during rush hour. You build roads to connect the pieces and discover, too late, that the pieces themselves are incomplete. The suburb with no coffee shop. The office park with no place to eat lunch that isn’t a sad food court. The residential society sealed off from everything, with a gate that says safety but means isolation.

That model’s failure is now visible in data, not just in aesthetics. 

The chart tells the story of a structural reversal. Mixed-use’s share of new urban real estate projects has more than doubled globally since 2018. In Mumbai MMR specifically where land scarcity and infrastructure pressure have made the costs of single-use development undeniable that share has climbed from 9% to 44% in eight years. 

The Benefits of Mixed-Use”

Let me be careful here, because the term “mixed-use” has become one of those phrases that appear on brochures but are not backed up with anything concrete. A tower with 400 square feet of provision shop in its lobby does not count as mixed-use. The gated township, whose commercial component is made up of several shops, which close at 7 pm, is definitely not what the market rewards.

What works, also what the chart shows clearly is genuine integration. Projects where the uses are designed to feed each other. Where the footfall from residents supports the commercial tenants, and the presence of active commercial ground floors makes the residential units more desirable. That virtuous loop produces rental yields of 7.8% versus 5.2% for comparable single-use assets, resale premiums that run 34% higher, and occupancy rates that stay north of 90% even through market cycles.

The metric I find most telling is resident retention is that its 81% in well-executed mixed-use versus 58% in single-use residential. That gap is enormous. It tells you that people who live in places where life is genuinely convenient where they can work, eat, exercise, and access services without getting into a car; these people don’t leave the property. And properties where people don’t leave hold their value with a stubbornness that no marketing campaign can manufacture.

How Akhand Was Always About This

When we designed Akhand in Vasai East, the mixed-use conversation was important from the start even before it became the industry consensus it is now becoming.

Nine towers across a thoughtfully planned campus. Ira, Isa, and Ora; the three towers that have already begun to reshape what people in the Vasai corridor expect from a home. But the intention was never just to sell flats. It was to build a place. A place where a family could live, age, work, and grow without the daily friction of displacement.

Vasai in 2026 is at exactly the right moment in its own arc. The infrastructure is arriving. The demographics are shifting. Younger professionals, many of them in manufacturing, pharma, and logistics, choosing to plant roots here rather than commute from the city. They are not willing to accept the old model which was usually a flat in a soulless building, a long drive for every basic need. They want what cities used to offer intuitively, before developers forgot how to build them.

That is what mixed-use when done properly gives back to a buyer. Not just a product but a neighbourhood.

Mixed-Use Is Not a Trend to Catch.

Mixed-use is the structural direction of urban development for the next 20 years which is driven by land scarcity, by the lived preferences of a younger buying cohort, and by the clear financial evidence that integration outperforms separation across every metric that matters.

The question is not whether to build mixed-use. It is whether you understand it deeply enough to build it well.

A mixed-use project that works is one where the uses were designed together, not bolted together. Get that right, and you are not just building real estate. You are building a place people will fight to stay in.

That is the only kind of development worth putting your name on.