Mall-Boro Reds
Week 4. Junkspace versus Public Space. February 1st/Debate Part I February 3rdReadings:
My reaction to - Margaret Crawford, "The World in a Shopping Mall"
Coming from a finance background, I am always intrigued by how financial implications shape our built world. I am speculating that the lease structures of malls are the main reason for its decline.
A beautiful, historic market has low barrier to entry, and high turnover which is the recipe for original small business. It creates location, identity and uniqueness.
The lease structure of malls has catered to large chains, established department stores for financial safety, and the filling of large lease spaces. Which stifles originality, a bad culture for culture.
Considering this mall is "too big to fail" the mall mentioned had to adapt.
This recent Guardian article I found supports the speculation.
"Today, revitalisation efforts tacitly focus on drawing people away from both malls, and on encouraging the proliferation of street level, independent cafes and businesses that “inject the gaiety, the wonder, the cheerful hurly-burly that make people want to come into the city and to linger there”, as Jane Jacobs once wrote. Of American cities’ new breed of self-contained civic centres, she was scathing: “They banish the street. They banish its function. They banish its variety.” That was 1958. Now we’re beckoning all of that back."
-Scott Messenger
Great question on the financial structuring and leasing organization for big-box retailers and malls. It's crazy to read about the era of mall development where just about every American town over a certain population number was rushing to construct a mall - where plenty of architectural firms built practices on mall design.
ReplyDeleteThe short-term goals of completing a few leasing cycles and making the developers investment worthwhile, leaves us with the long-term issues of decaying malls bogging down a substantial quantity of land across the US. I'm interested to see if clever adaptive-reuse is the answer to substantiate the immense land use waste that malls have left us with.