The first enclosed mall, the introverted Southdale Shopping Center, near Minneapolis, 1956.As connoisseurs of place-making, architects have long idealized the publicness of the village square, while bemoaning malls and shopping centers. Granted, there are good reasons to moan: many malls give the appearance of having dropped out of the sky with no clue about their surroundings. Bulky, introspective, car-girdled malls are viewed as the wallflower building type in urban design.
While the village square has been locally grown over time, connected to surrounding buildings and inclusive, malls are a controlled publicness whose entrances aren’t really open to all, with an underlying agenda of merchandising, not socializing, at their core.1 Mall guests are scrutinized, monitored, and analyzed with a monetary aim, their surroundings scripted to create brand identity. The village square has been perceived as “real” publicness, while malls are vilified as faux publicness.
So why shouldn’t architects and planners continue their nostalgia for real village publicness (which, in California, can be more fantasy than reality), and thumb their noses at places like malls?
America’s Number 1 Attraction (not Yellowstone, not the Statue of Liberty)
Mall of America, in Bloomington, Minnesota, attracts 42 million people each year and is the number one most visited attraction in the U.S. Visitors don’t go there just to visit the 500+ shops and eat at 50 restaurants, they also attend public events and celebrations. Americans love this place: over 1500 couples have been married in it. Of course, this love affair has grown from repeated, and often life-time, exposure to shopping malls and centers. There are 5.57 billion square feet of shopping centers in the U.S., taking in 51% of all retail sales. According to the International Council of Shopping Centers, 94% of Americans visit shopping centers each month.
A lot of these folks are Californians. This state has the most shopping centers of any in the country, and Los Angeles wins first place as the city with the most shopping centers in the U.S.2 (Not surprisingly, one of the largest malls built, Ontario Mills, is just east of Los Angeles.) Overall in California, shopping centers are a bigger crop than produce, with 6,034 of them generating an estimated $130 billion in sales.3 Of those shopping centers, about 300 are malls, 300,000 to over 1,000,000 square feet in size.4 Every decade since the ‘60s has seen an expansion.
For Gruen, the interior of Southdale functioned like a town square. Opening Day, 1956.Consumed by Consumption
Before any teenager had ever spent an afternoon at a mall, back in the early ‘50s, architect Victor Gruen envisioned an enclosed shopping center as a new town center. The first indoor shopping mall, Southdale, was planned by Gruen in Michigan and modeled on a European shopping street recalled from his native Austria. Gruen devised a new type of heat pump that kept the interior at an even temperature year-round, so that visitors had a place not only for shopping but to “have social meetings, to relax together, to enjoy art… good food and entertainment.” (Unlike European shopping streets, Southdale was built in a cornfield outside Minneapolis.) For this innovation, U.S. News declared Gruen one of “25 makers of the American Century.” Southdale turned into a model for suburban shopping (and sprawl), and “for better or worse, Gruen changed the landscape of the continent.”5
The “Garden Court of Perpetual Spring” featured canaries and a magnolia tree. Southdale.Over the succeeding fifty years, suburbs and malls have propagated, hand in hand. The malls primarily attracted women with time on their hands, whose suburban values were reflected in the clean, safe, and well-landscaped interiors that turned their backs to surrounding homes, just as suburbanites had turned their backs to the city.
Countering the ennui of the suburbs and the isolation of the home, malls turned the task of shopping into something enjoyable, even fun. In many California new towns, there was no other public place to go, no older community context for gathering on the spur of the moment. Teens and the elderly often had no traditional gathering place, or, if such a place existed in a park or square, it was increasingly perceived as unsafe or boring.
Bigger and better malls attracted more and more visitors—so much so that they became competition for more traditional street shopping, often taking the “public” out of the public realm and beckoning them into a fantasy publicness. Sealed in the comfort of conditioned air, where day and night are banished (along with clocks and easy exits), larded with sale items, abundant food courts, Muzak, and free parking: the allure proved irresistible.
First mall water feature—a gold fish pond at Southdale.Ever New
Shoppers are attracted to malls partly because of their newness. Accordingly, malls cannot be left to their own devices for too long, but must be frequently repositioned, like aspirin or detergents. If not, they eventually suffer from “mall fatigue.” They begin to lose their magic attraction, fewer shoppers come, and, with fewer people inside, they’re perceived as stale. If an anchor tenant leaves, the mall may spiral downward. As a result, the public spaces inside malls, far more than those of public streets, have to be continually repackaged—stuffed with new colors, motifs, landscaping—for public appeal.
Malling Main Street
As new shopping centers worked to attract visitors through a Bigger & Brighter image and enhanced public spaces, the traditional stores and main streets that were losing their customers began paying attention. In some city districts, shops began to band together to coordinate landscaping, colors, merchandising, and security. Banners, events, places to sit and hang out eventually were added to downtown shopping streets as they sought to become “branded,” some as an idealized Main Street experience (evoking a cleaner, sweeter, better landscaped, and more expensive shopping version of the past). In some cities where there was little downtown life, the addition of an integrated retail development (a cousin to the suburban mall) was like a spark to dead wood. More than a few downtowns have become activated and revitalized, ablaze with life, through such catalyst developments as Pioneer Place in Portland, Oregon, and Denver Pavilions, on Denver’s 16th Street Transit Mall. Through branding, uniting shop owners, and insertion of mall-like retail developments, a new generation of downtowns picked up on the positive attributes of mall’s place-making.
Time Out: Rethinking American’s Favorite Recreational Activity
Shopping malls, although still beloved, were designed for a way of life that is now changing. Just as the suburbs are undergoing changes—people moving back to the city, longer commutes, affordability issues—so too for malls. Aside from the increasing percentage of retail sales through internet shopping, big box retail, and warehouse shopping, malls are also facing competition from the re-discovery of and re-kindled fascination with the new and improved Main Street. In addition, so many malls have reproduced across the landscape that they are becoming their own competition.
Adding to their woes, suburban values of one generation are being supplanted by the post-material values of another. Quality-of-life issues, identity, a sense of community: these are the values that shoppers often bring when hunting for a new pair of shoes. The experience of shopping is as important to them as what is bought, and that experience had better be fresh and memorable, or they won’t be back.
Luring a shopper who prefers being and experiencing to pure consumption, who seeks the good life and hungers for authenticity, requires a revisioning of the traditional mall. Developers are realizing that simply building Bigger & Brighter isn’t going to do it. The focus has turned to creating a sense of place. To overcome mall fatigue and to stay distinctive, mall developers are looking at successful downtown streets and focusing on shopping experiences that offer variety with each visit. And they are turning towards the “unscripted” public to achieve it.
Mall Morphing: Evolution & Devolution
People are hungry for an informal public life and they are attracted to the changing, the varied, and the conjectural. Architects may disparage a public that wants to pay for cleaner, more secure, more entertaining and controlled spaces than the reality that city centers often have to offer, but in fact these qualities are the key to their attraction. Recent shopping developments are trying to provide the best of both worlds through new hybrids—both controlled and ad-libbed.
While the first generation of malls turned inward, a new generation is appearing with both inward and outward facing shops. The best of these, like Perimeter Mall in Atlanta or Stanford Shopping Center, turn an appealing public face to their surroundings. Another evolution connects the mall with adjacent city streets, seen in examples like Broadway Plaza in Walnut Creek. The most successful models create a synergy: by tying into existing street shopping or enlivening building frontages that have for so many years turned their backs to public streets, merchandising and a sense of publicness are both strengthened.
As malls originally “improved” the street shopping experience, and shopping areas took on ideas from malls, so, in turn, mall developers have begun incorporating the diversity of experiences and spectacle aspects of public street activities. They have enhanced the old suburban formula by adding concerts, seasonal celebrations, festivals, more food, and more outdoor experiences. Morphing from mall toward mixed-use, developments have appeared with the multi-purpose additions found in downtown districts: entertainment, offices, and housing.
Becoming Real
The faux publicness of the Future Mall replicates the real publicness of the neighborhood shopping street of the past. The new shopping experience—like a traditional neighborhood—is an outdoor experience that has stores facing the street, with distinct façades and goods that are specifically chosen with the locale in mind. This arrangement combines the attraction of the scripted environment of malls that are managed by one master developer/owner with the appearance of individually owned shops, evolving over time.
These ambitious developments can create an instant downtown, as Mizner Park does for Boca Raton, Florida. The 30 acre site, once occupied by the failed Boca Raton Mall, was turned into a neo-traditional “village-within-the-city” as owner/developer Crocker & Company envisioned it. This $60 million development includes a main boulevard with a linear central green, Plaza Real (decorated with gazebos, benches, and fountains), surrounded by 50 shops and restaurants, evoking a European style shopping street, 300 units of housing, and 300,000 square feet of offices. Blessed by no less than the Sierra Club as a great sprawl-alternative, Mizner Park attracts residents and tourists alike, who flock to enjoy the Main Street atmosphere, both day and night.
Mizner Park creates an ‘instant’ Downtown for Boca Raton, Florida.California has big plans for similar developments. The soon-to-be-opened Santana Row in San Jose, a $700 million mixed-use retail project with 1200 units of housing (and a 200-room hotel with a grand European palazzo), turns the ailing Town & Country Shopping Center into an urban village—place-making on a fast track schedule.
These new types of urban retail projects can trace their evolution from lessons learned from European shopping streets as clearly as those learned from malls. Place-making begins by providing a diversity of experiences, by attunement to the culture of the area, by meaningfully tying into the surrounding streets and district, and through the addition of housing and services. The public is attracted through the enchantment of theme and fantasy, through a tailored mix of retail and entertainment, a sense of safety and security, and more than a whiff of excitement.
Who can combine these lessons into memorable multi-dimensional places, quickly, better than architects? Models are needed that include places for people to live and work, cultural amenities for all ages, good access, and some room for incremental growth; that’s what will make these instant downtowns or villages responsive over time.
The question is not whether these faux authentic retail streets create a “real” place (whatever that means in this new century). Instead, will people want to live there, and will visitors be drawn back over time, so that these places (like the Velveteen Rabbit) have a chance to be worn, altered, and loved?
- The issues of remote ownership vs. local ownership, the separation of production and consumption, and other economic differences deserve, at the very least, more attention than space in this article allows.
- From Shopping Center Directions, published by the National Research Bureau, Spring 2001, and 2000 statistics from the International Council of Shopping Centers, New York.
- 2000 statistics from the International Council of Shopping Centers, New York.
- Malls (a type of shopping center) are defined as regional or super-regional centers, typically enclosed, with department stores as anchors.
- U.S. News & World Report, on-line. cover story, 27 December 1999.
Photos of Southdale Mall , from Shopping Towns USA, by Victor Gruen and Larry Smith, Reinhold Publishing Corporation. Photo of Mizner Park by Barry Elbasani.
Author Dorit Fromm, AIA, has written on architecture, community, and housing for publications such as Architectural Review, Places, JAPR, Metropolis, and Home. She is the author of Collaborative Communities from Van Nostrand Reinhold, has contributed to The Encyclopedia of Housing, edited by William van Vliet, Sage Publications, and works at ELS Architecture & Urban Design in Berkeley. Co-author Carol Shen, FAIA, is a principal of ELS Architecture & Urban Design in Berkeley. She is chair of the arcCA editorial board.
Originally published 3rd quarter 2001, in arcCA 01.3, “Publicness.”
