In the “if life gives you lemons” mode, World Changing Seattle suggests that with the increased failure of malls in the stagnant economy, comes a New Urbanist opportunity to build new town squares.
I myself am a fan of New Urbanism (the effort to create architecture that spurs community building through walkable streets, a focus on pedestrians and public transportation rather than cars, mixed use developments, front porches, etc.). That said, as I wrote several years ago (“Leading a Civic Horse to Water“), largely because it is hard to do good analysis in this area, I think the evidence that New Urbanism produces more social capital is still rather weak.
The focus on malls for New Urbanism is not new. New Urbanism got its start in greenfield sites like Seaside, Florida.
But since then the movement evolved to focus on brownfield development (replacing old factories, and yes even malls) and infill development (overlaying New Urbanism on an existing urban site (often by redensifying corridors). Most recently New Urbanism had a role in thinking about the post-Katrina redevelopment (especially in Mississippi where Haley Barbour named New Urbanist-star Andres Duany to head a redevelopment task force. See some New Urbanist designs here for Cottage Square and Katrina Cottage VIII.
If New Urbanist architects and planners are successful it fits well with the fact that for many communities malls are their de facto civic spaces in a landscape that lacks any communal focal point: think the fact that many surburban communities lack a place for people to leaflet or think mall malkers and you get the concept of the shrinking civic space. It remains to be seen how creative and effective New Urbanist designers can be in converting a shrine to capitalism into a shrine for enlarging the human and civic spirit.
See World Changing Seattle’s blog post with images on Malls as Public Squares here.
See Congress for the New Urbanism’s report Malls Into Mainstreets.
I think its very doable, and indeed highly desirable, to build in and around malls. They occupy positions and locations that are strategic, and often centered in vast seas of parking spaces (the next era of greenfields?) that can be developed to make linkages with their surroundings. I believe the most interesting places and architecture are layered over, so it’s preferable to keep them when possible. There’s only one major difficulty in the long-run that I forsee: So many of these malls were shoddily constructed and are nearing the end of their planned lifecycles. How many times have you walked into some mall of yesteryear and seen the mop buckets catching the leaking ceilings, or the cracks running up and down those great plastered walls? I just don’t think they’re very sturdy. Maybe in those cases their footprints can be grandfathered in to make interesting, irregular negative space that organizes surrounding density infill.
(much less seriously)
We can tell our grandchildren how economies of scale worked in the time before ‘feudalism II: after peak oil’ or something like that…