Wal-Mart commits to charrette in Mississippi

Adelegation of new urbanists and Mississippians returned from Wal-Mart headquarters in Bentonville, Arkansas, in mid-January with a promise that the discount retailer would participate in a charrette writing a SmartCode plan for a section of Pass Christian, where the company may rebuild a store destroyed by Hurricane Katrina. As New Urban News went to press, three Wal-Mart representatives — director of architecture Bill Carroll, director of nonprototypical projects Don Mosely, and senior public affairs manager Kimberly Randle — were attending the start of the five-day session on the Gulf Coast. As a follow-up to last October’s Mississippi Renewal Forum, six Wal-Mart executives, including three top figures in the Real Estate and Design department, conferred in Bentonville with Laura Hall of Fisher & Hall Urban Design, Santa Rosa, California; Victor Dover of Dover, Kohl & Partners, Coral Gables, Florida; Malcolm Jones, chief administrative officer of Pass Christian, and two other residents of the community, which had a population of about 6,600 before Hurricane Katrina struck. Hall went as leader of the new urbanist team that worked on Pass Christian this fall. The team designed a pedestrian-friendly Wal-Mart as well as a mixed-use “Wal-Mart Village.” Dover was leader of the team for Ocean Springs, a 17,000-population Mississippi city where the Renewal Forum participants saw the potential of incorporating a Wal-Mart into a proposed transit-oriented development. working on urban formats Hall said the delegation learned that “Wal-Mart is actively working on what they call ‘non-prototypical’ designs, including green and multilevel urban buildings.” She said the environmentally advanced stores the company is proudest of — those in McKinney, Texas, and Aurora, Colorado — “have lots of cool ‘green’ stuff, but both buildings still have long blank walls and sit behind large parking lots.” Executives showed examples of urban, multilevel buildings — most of which appeared to have public streets in front of them — in Honolulu; Baldwin Hills, California; Long Beach, California; Coral Springs, Florida; and Korea. However, Hall noted that Wal-Mart officials said “they see this model being used mostly in dense urban settings outside of the US.” Wal-Mart executives questioned the appropriateness of the style that Ben Pentreath of the Prince of Wales Foundation for the Built Environment used in designing a mixed-use, multilevel Wal-Mart for Pass Christian during the October forum. Nonetheless, they claimed they were interested in having a store in Pass Christian that reflects the South. Prior to the Forum, they hadn’t considered an urban building model to be suitable along the Gulf Coast. “They said they’ve only built urban buildings where there was already an urban setting, and mostly out of the US,” Hall noted. “They normally don’t create the urban setting themselves.” Pentreath had sketched the Wal-Mart Village — a design in which apartments and townhouses, with small shops occupying much of the ground floor, would surround a large portion of a Super Wal-Mart. Parking would be hidden behind. Streets and sidewalks would make a setting comfortable for walking. “It humanizes big-box retail,” Pentreath said. Thomas Low of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. did a site plan of how a Wal-Mart could fit into a new Pass Christian neighborhood (see plan above). Early this year Wal-Mart executives still knew little about the SmartCode. But when told that adoption of the form-based code and its regulating plan in Pass Christian could permit construction of the Wal-Mart Village, at least one executive seemed pleased, praising the idea that the same rules would apply to Wal-Mart that apply to other retailers — something that is not always the case when a Wal-Mart becomes the target of local protests. Since the January meeting, a series of emails and phone calls has impressed Hall with “how much the Wal-Mart real estate and design folks really seem to enjoy these new ideas.” The municipality is eager to have Wal-Mart reestablish a store in Pass Christian. Before Katrina, revenue from sales at Wal-Mart amounted to 15 percent of the city budget. The Wal-Mart property will be included in the city’s SmartCode regulating plan. Hall expects to have “a very real plan/design for that property by the end of the charrette.” Later in January Wal-Mart CEO Lee Scott met with Prince Charles for two