A New York Times reporter heads to an industry convention touting the future of shopping malls. This is what she finds:
Despite near-non-existent consumer spending, the declining popularity of shopping as America’s favorite pastime and the chilling effect foreclosed homes in housing developments are surely having on nearby malls, most entries in the ICSC competition responded less to the future of the shopping mall than to the glory days to which we’ve recently bid adieu. I was struck by how little attention entrants paid to things like sustainable architecture, alternative transit or changing consumer attitudes about consumption. Architectural visions tended toward iconic futurist forms — domes or similarly curvy buildings that felt right in line with World’s Fairs past. Distressing to think that in 2059, we’ll finally get to live as the Jetsons did back in 1962.
I saw very big, very ambitious projects designed with an eye to [return on investment] more than consumer need/enjoyment, including one from a Japanese architecture firm proposing four and a half acres consisting of ballpark, retail and dining along with an array of “extreme” attractions (exactly what was “extreme” about them was left to the imagination). A Turkish mall project mixed a stadium, tri-level sports lifestyle center, Olympic swimming pool and 25,000 square meters of retail. I was excited by an entry that seemed to propose a new purpose for abandoned big-box retail until I discovered the idea was merely to transform the store into a massive digital billboard — a mediocre solution for say, an abandoned store in Union Square, and a totally inappropriate one for an exurban mall.
The role of technology seemed largely confined to all the ways one could shop using an iPhone and to body scanning (a trick straight out of the 2002 film “Minority Report”).
The full post is lengthy, but a great read. I do a lot of thinking and reading on urban design like this, and it strikes me that the number one problem is integrating each new thing into an existing community. Shopping malls are too self-contained and isolated to fit well into the larger city that they’re in. But big-box power centres are even worse — each store in those “malls” are isolated from the others.
There’s a real need for strong and motivated civic government to step forward with design standards that word force commercial devlopment to fit well into existing infrastructure. Unfortunately, too many city halls and city managers have fallen hook, line and sinker for the economic development argument, which neglects all other forms of development.
No, that’s not entirely true — the problem is that economic development, artistic development and recreational development are all done in isolation (there’s that word again) when they need to be considered together.
Grant Hamilton
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