Environments I. The retrofit of suburbia; B. The shopping mall

Real estate development’s most tediously repeated truism is that the three most important factors in property value are location, location, and location. That observation has now been stretched into a self-fulfilling prophecy. American retailing, in particular, has been subject to the mindless protocol of “locations” made by the intersection of traffic counts, producing at those points the massively repetitious shopping centers and malls of American suburbia. While the retail system is large and ubiquitous, size and pervasiveness are no guarantees of permanence. Direct factors such as evolving transportation patterns, and indirect ones such as fashion, are combining to render imminently obsolete a large portion of the auto-oriented retail space built since the 1970s. It is time to plan, not for carting the old malls to the landfill, but for recycling them as town centers seamlessly connected to the residential areas surround- ing them. To do so it is necessary to acknowledge that, apart from their physical form, shopping centers are supported by legal and financial systems that must also change for the transformation to be thorough. A person in a mall is merely a potential consumer, while on a city street, he or she is an actual citizen; merely imposing an urban structure upon a mall begs the question of how also to effect the associated changes of legal status for both property and people. To that problem we can offer no ready solution, only the admonition to keep it well in mind. well-sited for urbanism Regional centers and malls, originally placed by dint of traffic counts, are usually well-located as candidates for densification. Increasing the uses permitted in addition to shopping is the primary tool for change. The key is for the regulatory authority to grant office, hotel, and residential zoning in addition to the existing permitted retail. The quantities should be sufficient to rebalance the former mall as a mixed-use town center. It is then possible to engage a range of specific design tactics that together reclaim a shopping zone for urbanism. Change will take time. Many lending institutions, the backers of retail developers, do not allow overt acknowledgment of failure, and so transformation should be gradual, almost surreptitious. We must understand the mall as occupying a place in time as well as space, and replan it to allow sequential change. This requires two design operations. The first is to look at underground utility runs, outparcels, parking pads, vehicular circulation, and also the basic building structure to find out how to extract a street and block pattern from the existing circumstances. This will involve additional structures, but also removal of all or parts of others. The second is to look outside the property boundaries for potential connections to surrounding streets. (These steps repeat in reverse the stages through which malls evolved in the 1940s and 1950s.) As land values rise with the newly desirable mixed-use model, surface parking will gradually shift into the garages paid for by the added density of new uses. Some of the emerging blocks should be located and sized so that they can accommodate center-block structured parking surrounded by occupiable liner buildings. Not all blocks need to do so. For existing boxes, out-facing shallow liner buildings can be added to mask the blank walls and the service areas. Because a decrepit mall or shopping center with empty parking lots is the most dismal of neighbors, the political process of acceptance can be among the easiest for infill projects. It is less important that these kinds of interventions take place quickly than that they occur predictably. A longer-term picture must be put into place, making clear the steps for gradual transformation of a dying mall or shopping center into a lively, well-connected new town center. Change leads to urbanism will surely be the new truism. u