WE HAVE TO DESTROY THE MALL IN ORDER TO SAVE IT: As their customers switch to online shopping, suburban malls are hurting. The empty storefronts are multiplying in areas that are now “over-malled,” especially at the older shopping centers that have come to seem sterile and boring. To save them, Michael Hendrix looks back to the pioneering architect, Victor Gruen, who built the Ur-mall in the 1950s. Gruen originally intended that mall, the Southdale Center outside Minneapolis, to be part of a mixed-use development of restaurants, homes, schools and parks. Instead, it became an isolated world of stores surrounded by blank walls and parking lots — nothing but a “shopping machine,” he lamented as it was copied across the country.
To survive, the old shopping centers need to reinvent themselves, and suburban officials need to change the zoning codes that have stifled innovation for so long by making it illegal to build homes near stores and offices. Hendrix writes:
Many of these shopping centers are ideal sites for transit-oriented, mixed-use developments that include housing, retail, office, services, and public space. Infusing malls with new life means following a few basic ideas. Outward-looking shop fronts will need to be carved into malls’ blank faces. Large parking lots will have to be replaced by regularized street patterns that connect with surrounding communities. Mixed-used developments around the mall should sit flush with roads and offer residents and shoppers walkable, public spaces. Non-retail activity, such as office space and housing, will need to be integrated directly into malls.
Innovative policymakers should also consider malls as self-contained zones for experimenting with new ideas. Devens, a 4,400-acre redevelopment of a former military base on the outskirts of Boston, implemented a 75-day, one-stop permitting regime that helped turn the once-derelict space into one of Massachusetts’s most thriving commercial centers. Other cities have turned ghost malls into low-cost co-working and “maker” hubs—a boon in particular for poorer entrepreneurs who can’t afford flashy commercial space. New ideas can be tried out in old malls, trusting that the best ones will trickle out to the rest of the city.