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“Live, work, play” is marketing talk for the inarguably less sexy notion of mixed-use development. In 2008, no single phrase, with the exception of “green,” topped it for popularity among those selling urban real estate. Anyone who has visited a city or even driven on a highway leading to a city has undoubtedly stumbled upon the trifecta, often in billboard form. Illustrations most likely accompanied the phrase: a gleaming glassy structure or a café’ed-out Main Street, perhaps; maybe a prewar warehouse recently converted into loft-style apartments, shops and restaurants; or even one of the newfangled mall “lifestyle centers” that were springing up all over the suburbs until the recession hit.

The slogan has been gaining traction among municipal boosters who want to attract new blood to their cities. The Columbus Chamber of Commerce launched liveworkplaycolumbus.com last year in hopes of wooing more young professionals. “Businesses have open entry-level positions they are trying to fill in the area. The Web site is a recruiting tool,” says Susan Merryman, vice president of marketing and communication for the chamber.

But where did the phrase originate? If Bernard Madoff and the mortgage bundlers on Wall Street are making 2009 the year of scrimping, struggling and worrying, who can we thank for the years of living, working and playing?

One likely suspect is Richard Florida, the celebrity academic behind the 2004 book The Rise of the Creative Class and its now all-but-canonized theory that an influx of “creative” professionals can solve city woes. The author’s Web site, creativeclass.com, is subtitled “the source on how we live, work and play.” Merryman, indeed, had read the book. “It was a big influence for what we are doing in Columbus,” she says.

If Bernard Madoff and the mortgage bundlers on Wall Street are making 2009 the year of scrimping, struggling and worrying, who can we thank for the years of living, working and playing?”

Florida, in turn, attributes the term to a graduate student he taught at Carnegie Mellon University. The student dropped the “LWP” bomb during a discussion about how to retain young people in the Pittsburgh’s Oakland neighborhood after graduation. “She was a brilliant student,” says Florida, now director of the Martin Prosperity Institute at the University of Toronto. “We are trying to make the point that cities were about more than work.”

Research into the expression, however, betrays roots deeper than Florida or his student. The phrase distilled the goals of New Urbanism, a movement of architects, developers and planners who called for an end to suburban sprawl and a return to traditional towns where people live within walking distance of the places they work, shop and kick soccer balls around. “Live, work, play” sold the concept in three generic syllables, obscuring trickier issues such as how these towns were often built from the ground up on previously undeveloped land, thus creating new sprawl. A swift verbal gesture to catch the attention of even the least hip of suburbanites, it helped sell the concept of “downtown” to a generation of buyers raised out of town, where it was unheard of to build a house next to anything that wasn’t, well, another house.

The three terms dexterously characterize a wide variety of environments. “It’s a way to say a whole bunch of things in a very few words,” says John Norquist, president and CEO of the Congress for the New Urbanism and a former mayor of Milwaukee. “But there is a lot that is going up under the banner that isn’t exactly Greenwich Village.”

Norquist first heard the expression during the 1986 election for Milwaukee’s county executive seat. He recalls that the late, former Milwaukee County Executive Dave Schulz coined the term to describe his regional approach to the city’s economic development. A rotund bureaucrat with a gift for public relations, Schulz was best known locally for installing waterslides in public parks — and for riding down one, all 450 pounds of him, with television cameras rolling. “His idea was you could live in a county subdivision, work in a city office park and play in the county park,” says Norquist. “‘Play’ was code for ‘waterslide.’”

“Play” is code for “shopping” in suburban Covington, La., where the Pinnacle Nord Du Lac lifestyle center is currently under construction on marshland at the intersection of two highways. While developer Colonial Properties touts the project as an experiment in walkability, it necessitated widening parish roads and creating several large, tartopped parking lots that environmentalists say will wreak havoc on the area’s wetlands.

Developer Matt Schwartz, principal of Domain Cos., the Manhattan-based developer behind the live-work-play signs on Tulane Avenue in New Orleans, would be the first to admit that the expression “live, work, play” is often borne out of aspiration rather than reality. “We started using the phrase when we started developing outside New York City,” says Schwartz. “Here we need [language] to help people picture the amenities that aren’t here, that we are bringing.” Schwartz’s signs mark construction sites that, if all goes as planned, will in a year’s time become three apartment buildings mixed with retail. One building is already complete, its courtyard swimming pool awaiting water and the bikini-clad occupants pictured in leasing ads.

But “live, work, play” was ushered in by easy credit, and often, municipal policies and subsidies. With the credit crisis raging and cities cutting budgets, is the era of “live, work, play” over? Schwartz doesn’t think so. “This is a trend that will outlast the recession,” he says. “It’s a much more efficient way to live. Plus, it sounds good.”

Illustration by David Senior

This article appeared in the Spring 2009 issue of Next American City magazine. SUBSCRIBE NOW!