Malls as Make-believe Town Centres Minus the Wrong Kind of People

The Economist has an interesting article on how the enclosed shopping mall is dead and how a new breed of mall is being built - open air, with community serving uses like butcher shops, and sometimes mixed use.

That got me Googling and reading. The innovative real estate developer Rick Caruso is named in the article as someone who is thinking out of the box in making outdoor malls. Caruso doesn't call them malls, he calls them "streets". He gives them eclectic architecture like real streets built over time, and adds little squares and tramways. Caruso says he is trying to re-create the feel of a european town, on the theory that people spend more money when they're on vacation.

So why a fake main street when there are real ones in most older cities? The Economist says essentially that the real ones suffer from too much reality. People moved away from older downtowns and stopped shopping there because they were filled with people that most well-off americans would rather not acknowledge, the poor and ethnic minorities. This is why they built the suburban shopping mall. But now with diversity creeping into the suburbs and even its malls, what are people to do? One solution is to build these fake streets, but with acres of parking lots all around to keep out the poorest people and entirely on private property so that security guards can shoo out the individuals that scare away polite society.

Still, those snobs are the very people who will drive the cars that put GHGs in the air, so maybe catering to their irrational fears can be done in a way that makes them want to give more of their money to local businesses and less to oil companies. Maybe we can build complete communities around the open-air shopping mall. Caruso is famous for listening to local communities and giving them what they want in a compact package, compactness being measured here in dollars of retail revenue per square foot.

Caruso is starting to build mixed use centres, with housing and offices as well as retail, including housing above retail. In pursuit of maximizing profit and keeping out the riff-raff, are we going to accidentally minimize GHG emissions? I don't think Caruso's an environmentalist, but some of his plans look positively liveable and walkable. Expensive, but this is southern California, real estate is hot.

Then I saw this bozo. Westfield is a Caruso competitor whose projects are not only sprawl-inducing segregation between childless households and families, but one who actively plays to the prejudices of local communities in order to kill any true mixed-use community. And Caruso is now caving in. According to the article, "Caruso intends to build luxury housing in his malls in Glendale, Playa Vista and Albany, Calif. He dropped plans for housing at his planned project in Arcadia after opponents including Westfield said the new residents would strain local schools."

There you have it - new residents would strain local schools. This is the usual code for saying we don't want their kind (I'm guessing Latinos) here even if they can afford a house. There's something seriously wrong with a municipal taxation and governance system where higher-density development can be rejected because families would live there. As I may have said before, the density of childless households has no positive environmental benefit, it is largely irrelevant to smart growth, it is the larger households with chidren whose driving behaviour is affected by density.

Westfield's mixed use plan, on the other hand, is much more troubling. They argue that offices cause traffic congestion but shopping does not since it is off-peak, so they are transforming an existing mixed-use neighbourhood into a different mix and form. They are getting rid of two small office buildings, and replacing them with a five storey parking structure and a 42-storey luxury condo tower, with a 3-storey retail podium. A walkable town centre? I think not. This looks to me like an alienating community-killing auto-oriented anonymous set of land uses. Three-storey retail is a traditional auto-oriented mall. The condos have no interaction with the street. Definitely not pedestrian-oriented or family-oriented.

Tags: Urban Planning Urban Design Walkable Downtown Revitalization

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