An aging suburb chooses urbanism

In Michigan, an edge city is trying to become more like a real city. If ever a place could be classified as a landmark of suburbia, it would be the Northland Mall in Southfield, Michigan. Built in 1954, it was the first enclosed suburban shopping mall in the US, according to Tom Tanghe, executive director of the Southfield Downtown Development Authority (DDA). The mall, located just outside of Detroit, became the nucleus of a classic “edge city,” a term coined by author Joel Garreau to describe places of hypersprawl. The “heart” of Southfield, Michigan, is a sea of parking lots, office, retail, and apartment buildings, and heavily traveled highways and arterial roads. “You can’t go anywhere on foot, and it was planned like that,” says Jim Eppink, director of planning for Gibbs Planning Group, the planning consultant hired by DDA. “This was Detroit’s major suburb, and the auto was king.” Like edge cities in every metropolitan area, Southfield’s planning produced aesthetically brutal streetscapes and no true center. Lack of permanence A hallmark of suburbia is its lack of permanence. Whereas traditional cities are built to last centuries, edge cities start to decline in three or four decades. In recent years, the area around Northland Mall began to suffer from competition as developers built newer malls, shopping strips, and office parks farther out on the metropolitan fringe. Northland Mall was expanded and rebuilt several times over the decades and now totals 2.2 million square feet. Recently, however, some stores have become vacant and the owner, Equitable Life Insurance of New York, has put the property up for sale. Near the mall, an eight-story office building, formerly charging among the highest rents in the metropolitan region, is now used for self-storage. Looking for redevelopment opportunities, DDA hired a market research firm specializing in the New Urbanism, which documented a potential market for 3,400 new housing units in the city. Armed with this knowledge, Gibbs Planning Group is creating a master plan for the area — envisioning new neighborhoods of townhomes, apartments, shops, and civic uses lining human-scale streets and small parks. Long-term plan Southfield will not transform itself from a sprawling, traffic-clogged edge city to a fine-grained, human-scale place overnight. How much of Southfield can be changed from decades of conventional suburban planning is an open question. Perhaps the most challenging part of the plan is figuring out how to overcome the frequent and significant pedestrian barriers throughout the area. “It certainly will get better,” Eppink says. “But it won’t be a quick process. The change will come over a generation.” Already as a result of the plan, developers are considering mixed-use projects on two parcels. Southfield is a reminder of the impermanence of suburbia. Having passed its peak, Southfield seeks to reinvent itself. The form that officials are choosing is a traditional urban street pattern — the kind of place that edge cities were supposed to have replaced in the second half of the Twentieth Century. This process is not easy, but it may offer Southfield a new lease on life in coming decades. And, as other conventional suburbs age and become obsolete, similar opportunities will arise all across the US. In the 1950s, Southfield was on the cutting edge of suburban development. Now it represents a new form of innovation — transforming a suburb into a new urbanist place.