PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS

ISBN 1-56898-376-X $11.95

TMxHSLFQIy983769zv;:":":*:;

David J. Smiley editor

Mark Robbins series editor

National Endowment 

for the Arts

SPRAWL 

AND PUBLIC 

SPACE

REDRESSING

THE MALL

Washington, DC
Distributed by:

Princeton Architectural Press

37 East Seventh Street

New York, New York 10003

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© 2002 National Endowment for the Arts

05 04 03 02 4 3 2 1 First Edition

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without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Printed and bound in the United States of America.

Library of Congress Cataloging-In-Publication 

Data is available from the National Endowment 

for the Arts.

ISBN 1-56898-376-X

Front cover:

A freeway sign reinforces

the sense of the shopping

center as an everyday

destination.

NEA Series on Design

Other titles available in this series:

The Mayors’ Institute: 

Excellence in City Design

Schools for Cities: 

Urban Strategies

University-Community 

Design Partnerships: 

Innovations in Practice

Your Town: 

Mississippi Delta
I

The Shopping Mall 

in Context: History 

and Politics 

II

Case Studies

III

Redevelopment:

Projects, Strategies,

Research

IV

Development Issues

and Problems

Contents

Foreword 1

William Ivey

Redressing the Mall 3

Mark Robbins

Towards an Open- 9

Minded Space

Robert Fishman 

Addressing Redress 13

David Smiley 

Suburban Life and 21

Public Space

Margaret Crawford

Civic Space 31

Benjamin R. Barber

Antidotes to Sprawl 37

Kevin Mattson 

Repositioning the 49

Older Shopping Mall

Marilyn Jordan Taylor 

Villa Italia, 51

Lakewood, Colorado

Mark Falcone

Two Malls, 53

Kettering, Ohio

Marilou W. Smith 

Andrew Aidt

Urban Elements 58

Michael Rotondi

Three Landscapes 62

Glenn Allen 

Mixed Uses, Mixed 68

Masses, Mixed Finances

Gary Handel 

Reassembling the 72

Strip and Building 

around the Big Box

Darren Petrucci 

A Vertical Mixed-Use 74

Suburb

Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis

VMall: Vertical Density 76

SHoP

Design Competitions 78

as Catalysts

Rosalie Genevro

From Shopping Centers 81

to Village Centers

Richard B. Peiser 

Will Fleissig 

Martin Zogran

Roundtable: Obstacles 85

to Development

Mark Falcone 

Joseph F. Reilly 

Ron Sher 

Donald R. Zuchelli

Benjamin R. Barber

Organizations 98

Bibliography 99

Image Credits 99

Contributors 100

Endnotes 104
Is there a way to energize these

facilities, to reconceive them both as

landscapes and as structures that can

really reengage community?

—William Ivey
1

Foreword

William Ivey

Chairman, National Endowment for the Arts 

This book is the result of the first direct collaboration between the

National Endowment for the Arts and the Woodrow Wilson

International Center for Scholars. Neighbors along Pennsylvania Avenue,

we are similarly dedicated to bringing together the leaders in our respective fields to serve the public good. An examination of the mall, sprawl,

and public space represents a natural meeting place for the special mission of the Endowment in design and the special mission of the Wilson

Center in public policy. This book represents a unique gathering of

expertise on a matter of crucial interest to the future of the American

built environment. 

The NEA is charged with nurturing our nation’s creativity and

preserving our nation’s living cultural heritage. Most recently we’ve talked

with Congress and citizen leaders around the country about the importance of placing creativity and cultural heritage at the center of

community and family life. That has the Endowment talking frequently

about the importance of arts education, in and out of school. But it also

has us interested in the built environment and the modified natural environment and the ways in which the quality of our engagement with

environment connects with our social patterns.

Since the shopping center is a focal point in so many people’s lives,

Redressing the Mall is timely and necessary. It is a synthesis of historical,
2

social, economic, and design studies that seek new ways of reusing what is

among our country’s most popular building types. This book not only

asks that we look at the condition of the older shopping centers around

our cities but that we look optimistically to find ways of making sure

these shopping centers can once again contribute to our nation’s social

life. Especially important to this book are the many different points of

view on the issue of sprawl and more particularly on the issue of troubled

or abandoned shopping centers. This issue represents a very serious challenge and a real opportunity. Is there a way to energize these facilities, to

reconceive them both as landscapes and as structures that can really reengage community? This book concerns itself not only with what might

be done, or what should be done, but what can be done and how it might

be paid for. In my years in Nashville, Tennessee, as a director of the

Country Music Foundation and the Country Music Hall of Fame, I participated in at least a half-dozen plans that attempted to shape the growth

and redevelopment of different parts of the community of Nashville.

Those plans unfortunately sit on shelves, and their recommendations

have been ignored almost totally, not because of any lack of good will, but

because the financing wasn’t there, and thus the impulse was never there

to move from planning through to execution. Too much was left to the

good will of developers who couldn’t afford to put in the fine elements of

those plans. One crucial contribution of this book is that it attempts to

synthesize the design element and the financial element as integral parts

of the larger challenge to create public spaces.
3

Redressing the Mall

Mark Robbins

Director of Design, National Endowment for the Arts

The suburban shopping center might at first appear to be an unlikely object

of scrutiny for the National Endowment for the Arts. In fact, the idea for

this project emerged from our long-standing commitment to community

planning and urban revitalization. Redressing the Mall complements two

existing programs at the Arts Endowment that focus on American communities and design. The first, The Mayors’ Institute on City Design, was

originated in 1986. In six annual sessions the institute brings mayors

together with architects, landscape architects, planners, and economic

specialists to strategize the revitalization of their neighborhoods and

downtowns. The second, Your Town, aims to foster a greater awareness

of the ways that smaller communities can direct their own growth over

the long term without eliminating the possibility of new development 

and change. Between these two programs, between downtown and the

small town so to speak, lies the country’s vast suburban landscape where

most Americans live and work. Recognizing the unique history and scope

of suburban development became the impetus for this project. 

NEA Chairman Bill Ivey encouraged our examination of the 

commercial and social aspects of the suburbs and suggested, given the

dimensions of the topic, the benefit of a specific focus. We chose to 

narrow the field to the proliferation of “dead malls,” the older shopping centers that for a number of reasons had fallen into disuse. These 
4

commercial ventures no longer generate income for the municipality or

for the developer, nor are they positive elements in the manmade landscape. Our primary goal in undertaking this project has therefore been to

explore ways in which these sites could be reused and transformed into

viable, productive centers often in places that have lost, or never really

had, a community center. By exploring new approaches and innovative

partnerships in economics, land use, planning, and design, we hope these

often choice sites can become not only fiscally viable but positive assets to

their communities. 

We also hope this publication will foster a more serious examination of new models for making and using public space. Our culture is

rapidly changing, and the nature of the public sphere has also changed

dramatically over the years. For example, a recent headline in the

Washington Post, “Hackers Attack Web Sites,” framed the Internet as a

kind of public realm, a concept that would have been meaningless five

years ago. Often our preconceptions of place and space lag behind social

and technological changes. 

When we think about American cities, the image of a coherent

urban center persists. Set at the other end of the spectrum, we often have

a heroic image of rural America. Even our concept of what falls in

between relies on a snapshot of suburban life idealized in the 1950s. But

these views, frozen in a misty past, continue to influence decisions about

the planning and design of the new suburban landscape. Most urban centers have long evidenced patterns of disinvestment and abandonment,

depleted population and decayed building stock. Efforts to accommodate

the automobile-based rules of the suburb created seas of surface parking

anchored by a mere handful of significant, if isolated, towers. Today’s

American landscape is dominated by other patterns: cloverleaves of the

interstate highways that girdle our cities, cul-de-sac office parks, and

housing developments in isolated clusters. At times small fragments of the

Jeffersonian grid show through as reminders of farm fields, the last remnant of the agrarian past. Yet, in this landscape, one still finds aspirations

for something more, in the bucolic names of unremarkable strip centers,

in new Victorian villages, and in the fiberglass barn siding of fast food
5

restaurants. All suggest the pull of memory and history as we gather to

park and shop. A desire for continuity and familiarity continues to shape

our ideals and the design of our environment. 

More recently, other models of development have replaced older

strips and shopping centers further out at the edges of existing development. In Columbus, Ohio, for example, a place called Easton Town

Center, though built in 1999, looks at first glance like a traditional town.

Easton is a recreation of a town square out of whole cloth with a seeming

mix of building types and architectural styles. A hansom cab travels the

abbreviated main street, inhabited by national retailers including J. Crew,

Banana Republic, and Williams-Sonoma. The development currently sits

like a commercial Oz in the middle of a cornfield. 

Two issues are raised by this newer form of development. First, the

nostalgic simulation of an older town preys on our desire for connection

and community, though only as a marketing model. Second, and perhaps

more problematic, is the fact that Easton Town Center sits in the tertiary

ring, far out from the city center. The new roadways and infrastructure

constructed to provide access to this development exacerbate sprawl, even

as the new “Town Center” presents the appearance of an antidote.

Typical patterns of

development at the

periphery of a city.

Cul-de-sac developments,

office parks, and highway

arteries obscure the last

remnants of farm fields

and the national grid. 
6

While providing an image of civic comfort, Easton offers only a

partial copy of urban public space. A comparison with a public market in

Cincinnati, only two hours away, is instructive. The two places don’t look

very different until one comes across the Easton Town Center “Code of

Conduct” and is reminded that Easton is not public space. Photo-IDs can

be requested by security guards and “appropriate attire” is required.

Unauthorized singing and dancing, the distribution of literature, and the

“congregation of minors in groups larger than four” are expressly forbidden. (A photographer attempting to document the space, without

authorization, was reprimanded by a guard and pointed in the direction

of the decorative stanchion with the list of rules prominently displayed.)

The lesson for citizens and professionals is that Easton and other

similar spaces are designed wholly to make us good consumers and to

engage us in a fantasy, which includes the participation in what appears to

be a public realm. Now, the ability to purchase fantasy and fulfillment is

part of our birthright as Americans. What drives us psychically and

socially, as well as in our shopping habits, often drives the market. But

when this market-based fantasy is offered as the sole setting for community, we diminish the choices and opportunities for which we often pride

ourselves. The reach of the market, however, is not completely limiting

or determined. People are creative and will always appropriate space for

their own, often unintended, uses. The design and control of space can

deter or enhance our capacity to respond as individuals to the social and

physical environment. 

Easton Town Center, a

new commercial center

created in the image of 

a historical town. On the

left, the Easton Town

Center “Code of Conduct.”
7

In this small publication, we hope to encourage other visions that

enable communities to engage architecture and landscape in more complex and multifunctional ways than is usually the case. The work in this

volume offers models for public spaces that encourage interaction. In

addition, we hope that this material can show a variety of methods for the

design and effective implementation of such models. We hope to encourage an idea of public that is perhaps best seen in one of the classic

examples of American urban design: New York’s Central Park. The park

is a place where anyone can go, without an entry fee or minimum purchase; it is a place that encourages multiple activities, some commercial

and some not; it is a place where one can stroll, play cards or baseball,

exercise political speech in groups of all sizes, listen to music, buy a hot

dog, or just stretch out and take a nap. For all types and ages of people,

places like Central Park provide options. Great cities have always provided the space for their citizens to be in public, to register an individual

presence in a collective environment.

As our culture changes, we need to envision other models for creating public space, forms of urbanism that don’t quite exist yet. The

suburbs will not all become dense in the same way as traditional urban

centers, nor will the car spontaneously disappear; people will still want to

be seen in public. This situation requires an innovative approach that recognizes the way we live, with cars, DVD players, and all. The hope is to

accommodate social diversity, the pedestrian and the car, and satisfy our

often conflicting desires for the suburban ease of big box shopping and

for the liveliness of streets. This mix of uses may lead to new forms and

terms that grow from the American context, requiring invention and subtlety in order to understand the complexity of the undertaking. 

A stimulating new vision is called for: one that can help rescue the

failing centers but also help them to be genuine places in the older areas

of our spreading suburban environment. We need to develop a deeper

sense of how to achieve these changes, and to work toward guidelines for

action. This is the challenge for this book and for this project. 
8

Acknowledgments

The conference on which this book is based—“Sprawl and Public Space:

Redressing the Mall,” held in February 2000—was framed within the first

year of my tenure at the National Endowment for the Arts. Many people

worked on the project and helped make the conference possible. I’d like to

acknowledge my collaborator, the historian Robert Fishman, then a fellow 

at the Woodrow Wilson Center, our partners in this project. Fishman’s 

1987 Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and Fall of Suburbia remains a central text 

in trying to understand the evolution of suburbia and its impact on 

American culture. I’d also like to thank Michael Lacey, Director of the

American Program at the Wilson Center, for recognizing design and design

discussion as integral parts of contemporary American culture. The Wilson

Center’s Susan Nugent and Ed Martini also provided invaluable coordination and assistance. 

At the NEA, I’d like to recognize Chairman Bill Ivey for his insights

and early support of this project; Karen Christensen, Deputy Chair, for her

faith in this work; and Susan Begley, Design Specialist, who worked long 

and hard to make the conference a reality.

This publication has had an interesting course in coming to fruition.

My thanks to David Smiley, editor, who has contributed great energy and

insight in assembling and crafting the final form of this work. Jason Pearson,

the first Graham Fellow in Federal Service at the NEA, has been invaluable

in his spirited coordination of all our efforts and Kristina Alg, the second

Graham Fellow, has worked to bring this project to completion. I would also

like to thank Ann Bremner for her enlightened assistance with copy editing

and M. Christopher Jones of The VIA Group for his exciting book design.

I’m pleased that this book is appearing as part of the NEA series on design

issued by the Princeton Architectural Press. At the press, Kevin Lippert and

Jennifer Thompson offered generous support and guidance in finalizing the

publication. Finally, great thanks are due to each participant in the symposium and to the contributors to this book. Their suggestions and perspectives

have added to our collective view on a very complex field. The approaches

that may be gleaned from this publication will, we hope, benefit us all.
9

Towards an Open-Minded Space

Robert Fishman

Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, 

University of Michigan

One central theme of political philosophy in recent years has been the

importance of public space for the vitality of democracy. A democratic

polity needs what the philosopher Michael Walzer has called “openminded spaces,” places where a wide variety of people can coexist, places

where a wide variety of functions encourage unexpected activities, places

whose multiple possibilities lead naturally to the communication that

makes democracy possible. Americans used to show a remarkable talent in

creating such places, but this talent has been lacking in first-ring suburbs,

those developments built just after 1945. These places tend to be dominated by what Walzer has called “single-minded spaces,” that is, spaces so

rigorously defined for a single purpose that they exclude the liberating

openness of genuine public space. 

Despite the seeming ascendancy of single-minded spaces, an unexpected opportunity for the creation of public space has opened up in

suburbs throughout the country. The changing economics of retailing has

rendered obsolete many older, first-ring shopping malls, and these underutilized or even dead malls are usually found in places without a

traditional town center. The suburbs in which the malls are located are

also experiencing demographic changes and aging of population, housing,

and building stock. Boarded-up malls sit by the highway and function like

billboards that say “Disinvest Here.” Ultimately, the rise of dead malls
10

undermines the communities in which they are located, fueling further

disinvestment and sprawl, more distending and distortion of metropolitan communities.

Are there alternatives? Can dead malls be transformed from 

eye sores and financial liabilities to civic assets? Can their rebuilding

become a sign that a positive cycle of rebuilding and renewal has

replaced our terrible habit of abandonment? In other words, can these

underutilized spaces be redesigned as open-minded spaces that can 

nurture a wide range of functions now neglected in most suburbs? 

Can the dead mall be transformed into the 21st-century version of the

town square? Transforming the mall into a community gathering place

might seem to contradict its very commercial essence. Walzer called

the shopping center the epitome of single-mindedness, but this observation overlooks the complex and openly self-contradictory aspects 

of the form. 

In part we need to recognize that the success of the shopping

center comes out of the single-minded removal of the shopping function from the dense multifunctional downtown, and the substitution of

this relatively simple fragment for what had been a complex whole. But

when we look at the innovations that made this single-minded space

possible—taking shopping to the suburbs, situating the stores in the

center of vast parking lots, turning the stores inward towards a pedestrian space—we see the creation of what many observers have called a

dream world of shopping. And this dream world has had a remarkable

capacity to absorb new commercial, entertainment, and recreational

functions, most notably the synthesis of the shopping center and the

theme park. But is this open-minded space? Victor Gruen, the architect

perhaps most responsible for the proliferation of shopping centers in

the 1950s, believed they should be designed to “service civic, cultural

and social community needs.” In other words, malls can and must be

open-minded spaces. Yet this transformation will be difficult to achieve,

and there are many challenges. 

First, a civic challenge. In suburbs where people are accustomed

to driving directly to specific destinations for single functions, what can
11

draw people to open-minded spaces? What combination of functions creates viable public space?

Second, an economic challenge. As we have learned, a civic square

that excludes commerce itself becomes a kind of single-minded space. A

vital public space needs an economic base, but how can this base be sustained in places that are already failing economically?

Third, a design challenge. How can physical design changes

achieve civic and economic objectives in a context where older models no

longer apply? The old mall formula was a remarkable and unexpected

synthesis of disparate elements, some drawn from traditional urbanism

going back to the Greek agora and others from commercial and even

industrial design. The question for older shopping centers is whether

they can be rethought and reconfigured in a new way to create openminded space. 
12
13

Addressing Redress

David Smiley

Columbia University

The meanings implied in the term redress range from remedy to repair,

from reparation to compensation. That such a term could be applied to

the troubled inner suburban shopping centers that are the subject of this

book requires an understanding of the mall as an integral feature of the

ever-expanding urban and suburban landscape and an appreciation of the

social life of the millions of Americans who feel quite at home in the

shopping center. The work collected for this book embraces the pivotal

role played by the shopping center and is based on a conviction that failing centers can once again become integral parts of their communities. 

In the decades after World War II, many urbanites left their apartments and small homes to settle at the periphery of older, high-density

cities such as New York or in newer, low-density cities like Los Angeles.

While this phenomenon had been underway since the 19th century, the

postwar scale and intensity of suburban residential growth were unprecedented. Following close behind this residential expansion was a relatively

new form of retailing organization called the shopping center (the term

“mall” did not come into use until the 1960s), which provided suburbanites with easy access to downtown department stores, specialty stores, and

local services. These shopping centers were portrayed by their owners,

designers, and many of their users, with varying degrees of sincerity, as

new community gathering places as much as retailing facilities. Famed

Cross County Shopping

Center, Bronx, NY, 1955;

Lathrop Douglass,

architect. An early 

model of the “planned

regional shopping center”

in which small stores, a

large anchor store, and a

small office building were

organized around

landscaped, outdoor,

green spaces.
14

mall architect Victor Gruen, perhaps lifting a term from the architectural

theorist Sigfried Giedion, called the shopping center a “crystallization

point” in the vast residential expanses of the emerging suburban

landscape. Advocates like Gruen believed that the new shopping centers

would give order and shape to mushrooming suburbs, and he predicted

that greater social interaction and richer public life would be created in

these new environments. 

Postwar shopping centers did indeed become the focus of social

life for many Americans, but in the decades-long process of suburban

expansion, not all shopping centers have fared well. Many shopping centers of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s were remarkably successful, but they

increasingly became victims of their own success as the waves of development they once led inexorably passed them by. Bigger and more lucrative

shopping malls built on cheaper, undeveloped land further from denser,

urban areas transformed into sad shells the proud icons of an earlier wave

of suburbanization. As noted by many of the contributors to Redressing the

Mall, a substantial percentage of shopping centers have become architecturally, economically, and socially obsolete. Abandoned, boarded up, or

still in their death throes, these malls no longer generate profits, no

longer serve their communities, and worse, drain the financial base and

social spirit from their neighborhoods. Such inner-ring shopping centers

are in dire need of care and attention. 

But failed shopping centers are not just a matter of deteriorating

buildings and cracked parking lots. The communities in which they sit

have also changed. In the past half-century, as middle-class whites moved

up the real estate ladder into newer, more exurban residential developments, inner suburban communities often moved down the same ladder.

This was not without benefits, since the smaller houses of older communities became affordable for less affluent and often marginalized groups

aspiring to single-family homes with backyards and barbecues.

Unfortunately, the older shopping centers and the business models

through which they were built proved far less adaptable. Once bustling

places of gathering, part-time employment, and commerce, they have

become community liabilities. According to conventional wisdom, the
15

racial, ethnic, and class portraits of the communities that now surround

many older malls cannot sustain the profits and cash flow to maintain

viable businesses. But conventional wisdom can be a brittle form of

knowledge, and in the case of the older shopping center, such thinking

fails to acknowledge that population and census studies of inner suburban

communities show bustling neighborhoods filled with people who are

employed, who own their homes, and are more than ready to shop and

use these places for a variety of activities. Such places may not always fit

into established marketing niches, but today the population density of

inner suburban areas points to a high percentage of potential customers

for a smarter kind of retailer, developer, banker, or designer.

This new diverse demography suggests that analyses of the mall

need to transcend questions of commerce to address how these places

support the public life of their communities. Redress, in this case, refers

to a change in the way shopping centers are expected to function and

whom they are intended to serve; in other words, redress quite literally

suggests that we ask how shopping centers appear to their users. Many of

the contributors to Redressing the Mall define the public users of shopping

centers in different ways, but common concerns emerge in a consideration of the underutilized or outmoded center. Can noncommercial

activities be nurtured complementary to, or even independent of, the

retail activity that surrounds them? Can the older shopping center—

from finance to design—be reconceived for a new, more complex, more

community-serving set of uses? New malls across the country have turned

to entertainment to invigorate their shopping environments, but are there

other forms of public interaction that can operate in smaller, older malls?

There are no uniform answers to these questions, and the texts and projects

in this book broadly interpret the ways in which shopping and commercial

life have affected, and been affected by, conceptions of public use, access,

and regulation. At the very least, the collected work in this book creates a

new set of ways to perceive and envision the shopping center.

Ultimately, however, an understanding of the use of public space in

older shopping centers (as in many redevelopment projects) often amounts

to a discussion of what constitutes public space and, more precisely, who will
16

foot the bill for its creation and maintenance. Some observers decry the

treatment of public space as a mere amenity or a mere backdrop for shopping. The shopping center is, of course, an economic entity as much as a

physical one, but if public space is treated solely as icing on the cake in

shopping environments, we run the risk of eliding or homogenizing the

diversity such space presumes to foster. In contrast, other observers have

pointed out that stores, market places, plazas, parks, and even streets have

historically been highly accommodating to unanticipated and alternative

uses. According to this position, regulated and programmed uses at best provide an appearance of control while, in practice, different groups and

individuals find ways to make the space their own. Across this range of possible uses, there are always owners and institutions with legally sanctioned

and obvious control, but when the shopping environment is as close to public space as most citizens ever get, advocates of different stripes must at least

recognize the necessity for a certain elasticity in interpretations of the term

“public.” Thus, the work in this book does not reject commercial uses of

space, nor do the projects and authors reject the interaction of public money

with private money in the implementation of redevelopment projects.

Whether through compromise, Realpolitik, or calculation, the design, financial, and planning communities involved with the underutilized shopping

center recognize that its problems are too complex—and the layers of ownership, history, and social change too thick—to enable a clear-cut rendering

of what is and is not public. In this ambiguity, there is great potential.

What remains important is that all contributors to Redressing 

the Mall understand that there are a variety of ways in which the older 

shopping center can be reconfigured to embrace new uses and communities.

In that spirit, the book joins voices and interests that have not historically

shared the same space. Architects, developers, planners, cultural officials,

builders, bankers, and historians have come together to find new ways to

address each other and to examine possibilities for the ailing inner suburban

shopping center. 

The first part of the book, “The Shopping Mall in Context,” examines the historical formation and contemporary operation of shopping

centers and how these places have been altered by social, economic, demo-
17

graphic, legal, and political processes. Implicit, when not explicit, in these

discussions is the deep interconnection and tension between the mall as a

place of commerce and the mall as a community node. This sets the stage

for the second part of the book, “Case Studies,” which examines the current

condition of several very different inner suburban shopping centers. In various states of decay and redevelopment, all are desperately in need of

intervention and improvement. These studies demonstrate that the decline

of older shopping centers is intimately tied to local historical, geographical,

economic, and political dynamics. The studies also affirm that there are no

simple or abstract formulas through which redevelopment should always

take place.

“Redevelopment: Projects, Strategies, Research,” the third part of

the book, highlights design methods through which shopping centers and

other public spaces have been configured and reconfigured. This section

offers a variety of design projects to show how built additions, insertions,

building types, open spaces, and programs have been combined to create

new public uses. Not all the featured projects are for shopping centers, but

all demonstrate design methods that could be applicable to rethinking and

reusing the shopping center as a new public place. They demonstrate a

remarkable range of architectural, planning, and landscape possibilities

through which the older shopping center might be rethought. Integral to

these strategies are the design competitions, planning and design studios,

and design guidelines discussed at the end of this section. These often speculative forums can broaden the intellectual, design, and social arena in which

the discussion of shopping centers takes place, and they help reframe the

shopping center as part of a larger set of design and community issues. The

concluding portion of the book, “Development Issues and Problems,” is a

realistic and sobering appraisal of the economics of shopping center reuse

for which designers, architects, political officials, and public agencies must

be responsible if they are to redress the ailing shopping center. 
18

But failed shopping centers are not just

a matter of deteriorating buildings and

cracked parking lots. The communities

in which they sit have also changed.

—David Smiley
19

The Shopping Mall in Context: 

History and Politics

In this section, three noted scholars examine the historical, institutional,

and legal frameworks that have shaped the shopping mall and raise questions about the present and future role of the shopping center in

American society.

I
20
21

Suburban Life and Public Space

Margaret Crawford

Harvard University

Three dominant narratives have shaped the history of the American shopping mall. The first depicts the mall as a building type based on a rigid

and highly inflexible format, largely determined by real estate economies,

marketing research, and architectural behaviorism. The outcome of this

story is the generic suburban regional mall, reproduced from coast to

coast. The second narrative portrays the mall as a fundamentally antiurban force, fostering the growth of what is commonly known as sprawl,

defined as the antithesis of livable urban space and incapable of providing

genuine urban experience. The third narrative sees the mall as a vehicle

for a continuous process of commodification, through which a wide range

of social and communal experiences and public spaces are swallowed up

by commerce.

In order to broaden the picture of the mall, I would like to

“deconstruct” these narratives—to question some of the assumptions on

which they are based and to provide counter-examples that show that

malls operate in ways distinctly different from the views offered by the

usual narratives. 

If we look at the history of suburban shopping malls, we find that

these three views are not only misdirected but that they preclude a deeper

understanding of how we might address the necessity of change. First,

rather than acting as single, rigid forms, malls have been amazingly

The enclosed mall created

a focused atrium space, a

zone of urban intensity.
22

adaptable building types. They have continuously adjusted, reinvented,

and retooled themselves in response to multiple economic and social

changes; they take many forms and have flourished in a variety of

settings. Second, malls have functioned not as agents of urban disorder

but as agents of planning and order. This is especially the case in the

amorphous suburbs that proliferated after World War II, where the mall

provided a community focus and a centralizing element. As a result, many

observers saw malls as a positive force in shaping suburban life. Finally, I

want to suggest that in the long run, the processes that critics have seen

as generating the malls’ debilitating social effects are more complex than

they imagine. We need to see commerce and commodification not as

inevitable, one-directional controlling processes but as a complex condition that can be partial, temporal, and even reversible, creating situations

of decommodification.

In any study of shopping malls, the concept of “public space” also

needs to be scrutinized. Public space should be viewed not as a single,

unified physical and social entity but as a situation that can be

experienced in multiple, partial, and even paradoxical ways. Thus, there is

no single public space but as many different public spaces as there are

different publics. All of this suggests that the complex process of malling

can be directed in a variety of directions by changing any one or combination of such elements as public policy, regulation, financing, ownership,

and management, as well as physical form and design.

The earliest places that we recognize as shopping centers date

from the 1920s and 1930s. Among the innovations of the time was the

organization of these new centers under a single owner and manager.

Country Club Plaza, developed by Jesse Clyde Nichols in Kansas City in

1922, is the most famous. Designed as part of a larger suburban subdivision, it was intended to be an alternative town center or miniature

downtown for the new residents. The physical organization of the project

was based on the urban block, with separate buildings housing shops and

offices but designed in a single, coherent manner. This was also among

the earliest instances in which a private developer rather than a public

entity provided civic amenities such as fountains, benches, small parks,
23

public art, and public services. Highland Park, Dallas, of 1931, was similar to Country Club Plaza and followed the urban block mode. Places

such as these were considered to be community centers, and their owners

often sponsored Christmas celebrations, art fairs, and dog shows. They

remained, however, commercial ventures, intended to make money and

reinforce elite images of upscale suburban life. 

During the 1930s and 1940s, planners and urbanists—especially

those connected to the Regional Plan Association of America (RPAA)—

utilized the shopping center as a fundamental element in their strategies

for decentralization. In planned towns like Greenbelt, Maryland (1936),

designers placed the shopping center at the center of the community’s

social life, building on the earlier work of Clarence Stein and Henry

Wright. Mixing the commercial services necessary for a new development

with civic and recreational spaces, these designers and planners argued for

a new type of small-town life. Critics including Lewis Mumford

portrayed these communities as examples of a new settlement pattern that

could serve as an alternative to both the sprawl and disorder of the suburban strip and the increasingly frantic overcrowding of urban downtowns. 

These developments, however, occurred at a small scale. The

major explosion of shopping centers came after World War II when the

familiar model of the “dumbbell” mall (department store “anchors” connected by an outdoor pedestrian mall) appeared. Among the earliest of

the type was Shoppers World in Framingham, Massachusetts, which

opened with great fanfare in October 1951. These new malls were created out of necessity to provide shopping and services for new and quickly

growing suburban areas. The centers typically included both large department stores and such everyday services as supermarkets, drug stores, and

dry cleaners. The safe and protected pedestrian malls and courts also

housed tot lots, chapels, community rooms, and a host of temporary

activities including art exhibits, dances, and fashion shows. These activities, typically addressed to women and children, continued the suburban

tradition of domesticated public space. The low-key design of the openair malls, decorated with public art and landscaping, also mirrored the

image of suburban housing design. 
24

At the time, architects, planners, and developers saw the new

shopping centers as a way to reform the fragmented nature of development in both urban and suburban areas. The centers provided an

important centrality and focus for dispersed suburban settlements. 

In effect, the new centers offered what many observers considered to 

be “better” planned downtowns with easy parking and convenient onestop shopping. 

The primary theorist of this type of shopping mall was Victor

Gruen. An architect rather than a developer, Gruen attempted to

redesign the suburban mall to recreate the complexity and vitality of

urban experience without the noise, dirt, and confusion that had come to

characterize popular images of the city. Gruen identified shopping as part

of a larger web of human activities, arguing that merchandising would be

more successful if commercial activities were integrated with cultural

enrichment and relaxation. He saw mall design as a way of producing new

town centers or what he called “shopping towns.” Thus he encouraged

mall developers to include in their plans as many nonretail functions as

possible, adding cultural, artistic, and social events. He called this integration of commerce with community life “environmental architecture.”

At a larger scale, Gruen saw the mall principally as an urban

ordering device that, if used rationally, could replace the messy and illogical form of the American city with harmonious and sociable urban

patterns. In 1955, he proposed to transform the entire downtown of Fort

Worth, Texas, visually and spatially by applying the lessons of the suburban shopping center. His plan improved traffic circulation, separated

pedestrian and automobile traffic, and integrated commercial and noncommercial activities by organizing them around multiple plazas and

squares. Most importantly, he provided 60,000 parking places, making the

center easily accessible. 

Gruen also built the next breakthrough in mall design—the

enclosed mall—at Southdale, outside Minneapolis, in 1956. The enclosed

mall created a focused atrium space, a zone of urban intensity, energized

by plunging elevators and zigzagging escalators. It dramatically reshaped

the retail mix by expelling convenient everyday shopping to the strip in
25

favor of stores featuring clothing, gifts, and impulse items. At the same

time, its covered, climate-controlled spaces (especially in places like

Minnesota) suggested new forms of public and civic life. Drawing 

huge crowds to performances of the Minneapolis Symphony, annual 

balls, high school proms, restaurants and cafes, and dozens of social

events, Southdale vastly expanded the role of the mall as social and 

community center. 

Over the next two decades, as the enclosed mall expanded into

regional, super-regional, and megamall sizes, it generated its own activities and forms of social life. Girl scouts camped in malls; singles met in

seemingly benign surroundings; mothers and infants, as well as older people, gathered in cold weather; and on hot days, almost everyone went to

the mall. Malls also became important work places, providing women and

teenagers with convenient, if low-paid, jobs. The mall even created such

now-familiar social types as mall walkers, mall rats, and valley girls.

Finally, malls became magnets for concentrated suburban development

activity, serving as important regional nodes attracting adjacent uses such

as hotels, offices, and other urban forms. Providing concentrated communal and commercial activities, the mall served as the heart of what are

known today as “edge cities.”

Aerial view of a typical

1960s enclosed mall.
26

By the end of the 1970s, regional and super-regional malls had

saturated the market and covered the American landscape in patterns that

mirrored an area’s buying power. Successful older malls were renovated

and enclosed to maintain their market share, but the continued success of

generic or older mall types was no longer assured. New and more complex forms of production and consumption fragmented income,

employment, and spending patterns into a more complex mosaic. This

led to a multiplication and diversification of retailing and mall types into

a broader range of more specialized and flexible forms, which allowed for

a more precise match between goods and consumers. 

Such specialization occurred across a wide economic and programmatic spectrum. The earliest new form was the festival marketplace

pioneered by James Rouse. Rouse took malls from the suburbs to historic

or scenic urban locations as part of a larger strategy of urban revitalization in places such as the restored Faneuil Hall in Boston, of 1976. He

reconfigured the merchandising mix to feature food and souvenir shops

alongside noncommercial tourist venues such as museums and historic

ships. Most importantly, Rouse blurred the boundaries between the mall

and the urban setting. 

Another new niche was the specialty mall, which dispensed with

existing formulas such as the department store anchor to focus on specific

markets, locations, and goods. This type included luxury malls, often

using historic or European themes, such as 2 Rodeo in Beverly Hills or

the Borgata in Scottsdale, Arizona. At the other end of the spectrum was

the outlet mall whose large size and minimal design communicated discount and bargain shopping. Most recently, the entertainment mall has

changed the mall environment with a mix devoted to movies, recreational

activities, nightclubs, and restaurants, with limited but specialized shopping. These malls are often developed by media corporations: City Walk,

in Los Angeles, is run by Universal Studios; San Francisco’s Metreon, 

by Sony. Most widespread, however, has been the rebirth of the small

roadside shopping center, the mini-mall. In Los Angeles, more than 

5000 mini-malls have appeared over the past decade, and similar development has flourished in many other large urban areas. Although usually
27

Faneuil Hall,

Boston, Massachusetts.

Borgata,

Scottsdale, Arizona.
28

specializing in convenience and quick service, the mini-malls reflect 

their neighborhood settings, often utilizing a broad range of ethnic styles

and merchandise. 

Several trends can be discerned from this trajectory that lend

themselves to the subject of the reuse of shopping malls and the question

of public space.

Contesting “Publicness”

The definition of the “publicness” of the mall is not a simple given nor is

it irrevocably structured by ownership, management, or court rulings. It

is can always be struggled over and even renegotiated. This can occur in

even the most rigidly programmed setting, such as the enormous Mall of

America built in 1995. The Mall of America, connected by public transportation to downtown Minneapolis, was often crowded by thousands of

minority teenagers, or what the management called “inner-city youth,”

who were using it as a gathering space on weekend nights. Mall management attempted to find ways to demonstrate the nonpublicness of the

place, such as forbidding access to anyone without adult supervision or

hiring security guards. After much discussion, influenced by the minority

community—which was outraged by the situation—mall management

made a former Macy’s basement (which wasn’t working as retail space)

available as a youth club, supervised by students from the mall’s continuing education high school. This tacit acknowledgment of “the public’s”

right to at least some of the mall’s space undermines the purely commercial logic of the mall. 

Stealth Malls

Malls sometimes succeed by submerging or hiding their stereotypical features. In Pasadena, California, a new mall called One Colorado is so

seamlessly integrated into the conventional urban blocks and street fronts

of its neighborhood that, except for small plaques announcing that it is

actually private property, it is not recognizable as a mall. The mall operates as the lynchpin of the consolidated redevelopment and revitalization

of “Old Town Pasadena.” In this case, the mall, rather than the city, pro-
29

vides an open plaza that is widely used as a pedestrian walkway and gathering place. Other developers, rather than starting from scratch, are

building in and around existing buildings and businesses. The Beverly

Connection, in Los Angeles, combines a varied mix of everyday retailers

including supermarkets, drug stores, coffee shops, and restaurants with

entertainment and retail uses in adjacent buildings. Acting as a link

between a several block area of malls and mini-malls, it consolidates 

them into a dense and crowded urban cluster. This blurs the boundaries

between public and private in ways that deserve more attention. 

De- and Re- Malling

“Dead” or unsuccessful malls can be radically reconfigured physically,

architecturally, and programmatically. A well-known icon of mall culture,

the Sherman Oaks Galleria in Los Angeles, has been turned into an office

building with a food court. In an ongoing project, architects and planners

are performing radical surgery on Plaza Pasadena, a typical 1980s urban

enclosed mall shopping. By removing the mall’s large central section, they

reconnected it the to the city’s street grid, reinstating a logical connection

to the town’s beaux-arts civic center. The remaining parts of the mall will

also be reconfigured to contain small shops and offices with 400 apartments above. 

With experts now estimating the average mall life at less than 

10 years, enclosed malls are undergoing complete transformation and

One Colorado,

Pasadena, California.
30

redefinition. They are removing their roofing, dismantling relentless corridors, and punching through windowless walls to let in light and air.

They are changing every aspect of conventional mall wisdom. In many

ways, however, this is just a more dramatic version of the continual updating and evolution that have always characterized mall development.

New Mall Types

Altered financial, social, and political circumstances continue to produce

new types of malls. In Canada, Chinese immigrants, responding to

Canadian government investment requirements for immigration, have

reorganized the structure and financing of malls to create more hybrid

typologies. In the Richmond suburb of Vancouver, several malls juxtapose

mini-mall shops opening onto surface parking with more conventional

multistory enclosed malls with rooftop parking. Instead of having a single

owner, mall shops are sold to individual owners under a “strata” form of

ownership similar to that of condominiums. This allows owners to subdivide and lease their spaces. In addition, spaces in the mall’s aisles and

atrium are rented out for booths, tables, and even rugs. 

Without centralized control, these spaces have a dense, bazaarlike quality defined by extreme juxtapositions of size, décor, and use.

There is a wild mix of retailing with everything from clothing and food 

to insurance and car accessories, all of which are highly responsive to

changing local tastes and needs. The mall also hosts many local events,

specializing in children’s performances and Chinese holidays. Nearby, a

more controlled but still hybrid mall stacks two floors of shops with two

floors of offices and a top floor occupied by a large Buddhist temple and

monastery.

This brings us full circle: malls have now become so diverse 

that they are virtually synonymous with retailing. Americans now shop 

in malls that look like cities and in cities that look like malls. Given 

the extraordinary flexibility of this form of commercial development, it 

is difficult to predict the future directions the mall might take. But, if 

we can learn from the mall’s past, we will be more likely to be able to

shape its future.
31

Civic Space

Benjamin R. Barber

Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy,

Rutgers University

The mall has come to embody many of the dilemmas of a privatized 

and commercialized society that compels every institution to pay its own

way as measured by monies earned and quarterly profits distributed.1

Although in practice the mall has achieved some of the variety and pluralism typical of all American institutions as they spread into distinctive

regions and subcultures, I will focus on an ideal (if hardly ideal!)

paradigm. Certainly, there are malls that offer relatively diverse fare, 

are not dominated by “big boxes,” try to integrate restaurants and other

more leisurely venues into their commercial space, and are accessible to

public transportation. (Many of these exist in the vicinity of university

campuses.) But the dominant model is a big box anchored enclosed space

dominated by boutiques and specialty stores catering almost exclusively to

shoppers and without significant public transportation access. Malls of

this kind define the genre: they are not only the centerless centerpieces of

suburbs (in which more than half of America now lives) but are becoming

models for urban revival as well. Ironically, at the very moment when the

city is reappearing in the suburbs under the sanitized guise of the “new

urbanism,” the suburbs are invading cities through the malling of commercial neighborhoods and the displacement of seedy authenticity by

anodyne artifice.

The mall stands as a powerful embodiment of the privatization
32

and commercialization of space associated with the forces of what I have

called MacWorld, turning our complex, multiuse public space into a 

one-dimensional venue for consumption. The sameness of the architecture and interior design, and of the goods and entertainment offered, 

no longer has the excuse Howard Johnson and the Hilton once offered

the weary traveler: comforting conformity in an otherwise alien world.

Sameness now is a matter of efficiency, volume, and cultural homogeneity. Even the tie-in with multiplex movie houses is about consumer

conformity and the selling of films that are more and more closely tied to

music, fast food, and other commodities in which the mall specializes.

The multiplex is the mall’s consumer academy. A film like Titanic that is

an industry unto itself (at more than a billion dollars in revenues), puts a

half-dozen books on the best-seller list, sells not only its prize-winning

song but Celine Dion, music generally, and the hardware needed to play

it, [and] is typical of the vertical integration of modern commodities in

what I have called the “infotainment telesector.”...

The pervasiveness of consumer identity today is evident in market

research profiles, which classify people not by race or gender or even traditional class, but by segmented market inclinations. Clarita, a Virginia

marketing firm, charts potential customers and their behavior by reference to such nouveau niche categories as “pools and patios,” “shotguns

and pickups,” “Bohemian mix,” and “urban gold coast.” Identity itself is

increasingly associated with branding and commercial logos. If to be

branded was once the melancholy fate of cattle and slaves, today business

adviser Tom Peters (in his Brand You) tells his customers with satisfaction,

“You’re every bit as much a brand as Nike, Coke, Pepsi, or the Body

Shop.” The first step for someone who wants to brand himself is to

“write your own mission statement, to guide you as CEO of Me, Inc.”2

This consumerist one-dimensionality achieves a palpable geography in the controlled and controlling architecture of the shopping mall.

Malls are the privatized public squares of the new fringe city “privatopia,”

which uses secession from the larger common society—deemed vulgar,

multiethnic, and dangerous—to secure a gated world of placid safety. Cut

off wherever possible from public transportation (and the suspect publics
33

it serves),3 denuded of political and civic activities (often with the help of

State Supreme Court decisions declaring the enclosed space of malls to

be private and thus not subject to the rights of assembly and free expression that would apply in public space), the mall becomes the cathedral 

of our new secular civilization.4 It would be too much to call the mall’s

consumerist culture totalitarian, freighted as that term is with the 20th

century’s most egregious horrors. But inasmuch as the mall replicates 

a one-dimensional life in which every activity other than shopping 

vanishes, there is certainly something totalizing about its defining 

activities. The mall refuses to play host to churches or synagogues, 

to community theaters or art galleries, to political speech or civic leafleting, to clinics, childcare centers, schools, granges, town halls, or 

social services of any kind.

On entering an enclosed mall, we are asked to shed every identity

other than that of the consumer. Eating is about buying fast food and

moving back into the stream of shoppers; entertainment means buying

Hollywood’s latest and all the commodities that go with it; hanging out

and people-watching are discouraged by security guards and, more

important, the architecture is designed to impede sitting or standing

around and to keep the traffic flow moving into the shops. On weekend

evenings, teens may try to behave as they once did on Main Street strips,

and in the course of rainy afternoons, seniors may look to stroll and loiter

as they once might have done at a town post office or corner barber shop

or general store. But malls are neither designed for nor encouraged to

serve such purposes.5 Food is available in “fuel-up pit stops” but not in

restaurants where shoppers might while away valuable shopping time over

a social dinner. Clocks are nowhere to be seen—time stands still for the

shopper who must, under no circumstances, be reminded that it may be

time to be somewhere else.

Indeed, nowadays, malls do not even pretend to sell necessities.

No dry cleaner’s, no hardware store, no vegetable market, no laundry, no

place to pick up eggs or milk or a bottle of sherry or a newspaper. Mall

developers and their vendors prefer theme and specialty stores and ubiquitous boutiques like The Museum Store, Warner Bros., The Sharper
34

Image, Brookstone’s, The Nature Store, and The Disney Store that sell

you nothing you want until you get inside and realize you need

everything they sell....

Overhauling the Mall

This is the challenge for those who are critics of the dominant trends in

modern American architecture and planning and dissatisfied with the

responses to date. Suburbanization has meant secession, sprawl, and the

destruction of community. The “new urbanism” has addressed the loss of

vitality in the suburbs in a primarily cosmetic way, opting for the appearance of cities but avoiding those essential urban traits such as class and

race mixing, the delight real urban dwellers take in the unfamiliar, tolerance and even affinity for disorder, and the ubiquity of risk. Yet these are

precisely the rough and vital substance of real cities....

If...[some critics celebrate] the meretricious anarchy of the suburbs, confirmed haters of suburbanization tend to indulge a secessionist

strategy of their own, withdrawing into boutiqued cities that have practiced “urban removal” where they can feel at home and leaving

suburbanites to their tawdry little destinies. Or they dream of getting

people out of the suburbs and back into small towns. They wage quixotic

campaigns against big box stores like Wal-Mart and the Home Depot,

and yearn to close the malls so that downtowns will spring back to life—

but at the expense of less economically privileged suburbanites who

benefit from the low costs and multiple consumer options of the big box

megastores.6 Nostalgia for small-town America dies hard in a nation

where so many people spend the first 20 years of their lives trying to

escape the parochialism of the small towns where they grew up, and the

remainder of their lives wishing they could somehow go home again.

I would offer a less radical and more realistic approach. If a privatizing ideology and a consumerist culture have turned citizens into

consumers, we need to go to where the consumers are and try to turn

them back into citizens. If they go to the net and then become passive

spectators to what is supposed to be an interactive technology, we need to

“reinteractivate” the net. If they go to the mall in search of public space
35

and are seduced into privatized shopping behavior, we need to confront

and transform the mall. The aim is not to get people off the Internet but

to get civic, cultural, and educational activity on it, not to close the malls

or lure people out of them but to make them more like the multiuse public spaces they have displaced.

Given the ubiquity of malls, it makes more sense to rethink the

laws, politics, zoning policies, development incentives, and architectural

predilections that have forged our particular version of suburban life.

Which changes might encourage the reconfiguring of commercial space

in the suburbs? There is considerable latitude even within the confines of

purely commercial development for variety: Big box or small store outlets? Open-space parking, parking deck, or traditional strip-mall

doorfront parking? Public-transportation access or parking lots only?

Integration of residential housing or purely commercial? Just shopping or

subsidies for public art and traditional grocery store and dry cleaner vendors?...Cities have used tax incentives and building permit requirements

to induce developers to offer public sculptures, park space, and a livable,

environmentally accommodating architecture along with new retail and

corporate space....The answer to these questions obviously impinges on

the character of the public space a retail mall creates.

There is plenty of room for experimentation. Malls have been

overbuilt in the suburbs, some estimate by 30 percent or more. This

means failed malls and empty stores even in the successful ones.

Meanwhile, people have tired of the monotonous unidimensionality of

the mall experience, and the average visit has declined from well over to

well under two hours. In short, while flourishing in many ways, malls are

troubled enough to incite anxiety in developers and vendors, who are

looking for new forms of collaboration with the civic and residential communities they serve. In many cases this amounts to little more than a

search for a new promotion concept, a gimmick that gets people back

into the stores. But what looks like a gimmick to a developer may turn

out to entail a relatively serious deprivatization of retail space. A renewed

civic life instigated by, say, a second-hand bookstore or a community performance stage or a life-size chess set at the heart of a mall may give new
36

hope to retailers even as it allows customers to think of themselves as

neighbors and citizens.... 

There are a variety of ordinary institutions that can be found in

any urban neighborhood or rural town that could serve to diversify a

shopping center: a school, a post office, performance stage, or a childcare

center, a speakers’ corner, a public library, a recreation area, or a publicaccess cable studio, an Internet cafe, a teen club, an art gallery, a

playground, an interdenominational prayer hall. The presence of such

facilities would do more than introduce variety: it would turn private back

into public space, and it would lace commercial behavior with a dose of

civic activity, allowing customers to reconceive themselves as neighbors

and citizens as well.

There are a number of points of leverage that might move both

private developers and public officials in a civic direction. The development of an appropriate civic architecture that takes the mall as its starting

place would offer realistic designs to committed developers. Public officials can utilize zoning laws, permits for curb cuts that allow developers

access from the highway, and environmental and safety regulations as

both carrots and sticks to modify developers’ behavior. The courts can be

used to argue the case that malls are public rather than private and must

allow public and political activity. Currently, about a dozen states have

taken a legal position or, like New Hampshire, are hearing cases, with

New Jersey, California, and Colorado having ruled that free-speech rights

are protected in enclosed malls, implying that they enclose public rather

than private space. Finally, public transportation and road patterns can do

much to determine whether malls become suburban neighborhoods or

isolated, upscale retail megaplazas unrelated to their surrounding ecological and demographic territories.
37

Antidotes to Sprawl

Kevin Mattson 

Contemporary History Institute and Department of History, 

Ohio University

The regional shopping center faces a crisis today; some even speculate 

that it might die. Therefore, it is important to recognize that there are

bottom-line economic reasons for developers to listen to those who want

to make the mall into something more than a conduit for consumerism.

Can the American shopping mall become a mixed-use space where citizens gather for political and cultural events in addition to shopping? Can

the mall be a place where public art and intriguing civic design are put to

energetic use? 

The Mall as a Zone of Private Consumption

The shopping mall was an integral part of the post–World War II suburbanization in America. It symbolized the ideals of consumerism and

economic abundance that drew many Americans to the suburbs. But one

of its original proponents, Victor Gruen, believed the shopping mall

could serve as a “crystallization point for suburbia’s community life” and

become an antidote to suburban sprawl, not a contributor.1

Some designers of malls still speak the language of community and

place today. For instance, a recent proposal in Silver Spring, Maryland,

for a large mall to be called “American Dream” was billed by its developers as a “town center for Silver Spring”.2 Nonetheless, most mall

designers and developers reject this line of reasoning. For them, the mall
38

has one function and one function alone—to encourage shopping. The

spokesperson for a mall outside of Providence, Rhode Island, was recently

quoted as saying: “Some of the elements that went into the mall were

specifically designed to make it less accommodating. People question why

there aren’t outdoor park benches or aren’t planters at heights where people can sit, and the reason is because you don’t want to encourage people

to just come and hang out. You want them to come in and use it for the

purpose it was designed for—to shop, be entertained, and dine. The mall

is reserved for use of mall patrons, and if you’re not a mall patron, you’ll

be asked to move along.”3 This is a quintessential statement on the mall

as a private zone for consumption—a vision that has dominated the

design of malls ever since architects like Gruen became successful.

The purpose of the mall as a one-dimensional environment for

shopping is highlighted when citizens try to use malls for something else.

Realizing that malls are places to connect with fellow citizens, some have

decided to treat them as public spaces. The activities of citizens who

leaflet, protest, or otherwise use malls as public space have resulted in a

number of contentious court cases—all of which have forced mall owners

to spell out their argument that the mall is a purely private space and

prompted important debate about the privatization of space. Early federal

rulings, from the United States Supreme Court led by Earl Warren in the

late 1960s, favored the free speech rights of citizens over the private

property rights of the shopping center owners. But in the 1970s, the

Court—then led by Warren Berger—changed its position and ruled in

successive cases that certain free speech acts did infringe on shopping

center owners’ property rights without significantly enhancing free

speech. The federal Court shifted this recurring legal debate to the state

level in a 1980 ruling (PruneYard Shopping Center vs. Robbins), which said

that any state could extend its free speech protections beyond the federal

standards. Since then, many state rulings have been in favor of property

rights, but some states—including California, Oregon, Massachusetts,

Colorado, Washington, and New Jersey—have ruled in favor of more

extensive free speech activities and validated the concept of malls as 

public spaces.4
39

These legal rulings have addressed the current dilemma of public

space and suburban shopping centers. Arguments made in favor of the

free speech rights of citizens often claim that speech is not really free

unless it is allowed to reach the public. Since the public goes to malls, the

reasoning goes, free speech and other political or civic activity must be

allowed there. For instance, in 1968 when Thurgood Marshall argued

that a shopping center in Pennsylvania had to abide by the First

Amendment protections, he argued that malls were the “functional equivalent” of a downtown in pre-automobile cities. More recently, in a ruling

in Colorado, the state supreme court argued that a mall “functioned as a

latter-day public forum” and needed to recognize this de facto role and

allow protesters.5 This “public forum” principle is often at the center of

current state court debates. The central idea is that people need spaces in

which they can conceive of themselves as citizens committed to political

debate and persuasion and as neighbors with common educational and

cultural needs. 

The tension between malls as public spaces and malls as private

property has also been addressed in legal debates about the public funding or incentives provided to mall developers. Free speech advocates

believe that since cities and local governments help to support malls in a

number of ways (i.e., taxation incentives and development grants), malls

are not only private but also, by necessity, public. In a recent district

court decision in favor of the rights of anti-fur activists who protested in

the largest mall in the U.S., the Mall of America in Minnesota, the judge

agreed with this view bluntly, writing “a publicly funded private entity is a

contradiction in terms.”6 But mall managers and others arguing for the

primacy of private property rights have rejected this view as a misunderstanding of the shopping center’s relation to the local community and the

public. In the Minnesota case (which mall managers eventually won), a

Mall of America manager refuted the judge’s position on the grounds that

the public money provided for the mall was “for the sole purpose of stimulating economic development” and that the profitable Mall has more

than repaid the money through tourism revenues. This echoes other mall

managers and owners who argue that the sole purpose of the mall is
40

shopping and that assuring the safety and comfort of shoppers requires

management to control any activities that might disturb them.7 What

these court cases make clear is that mall owners want shopping malls to

remain dedicated to one purpose only—the safe facilitation of private

consumption.

Cracks in the Modern Shopping Center

A certain irony has emerged in recent years. While shopping center owners have argued that their sole responsibility is to facilitate consumption,

new forms of shopping have started to challenge the mall. In comparison

to a suburban shopper in the 1950s, a current shopper has more “places”

to buy things, many of which offer quicker access to “overworked” suburbanites.8 Key here are big box stores (Wal-Mart, etc.) that offer shoppers

all items under one roof; catalog shopping that allows people to purchase

goods without leaving their homes; and more recently “e-commerce” and

on-line shopping sites. These new forms of consumption consistently

portray themselves as alternatives to shopping at malls....9

Though it is too soon to say whether these new modes of shopping will do away with the shopping mall, one thing is for certain.

Visitation to shopping centers has declined, many traditional anchor

department stores (i.e., Caldor, Service Merchandise, etc.) have gone

bankrupt and a New York City real estate firm reported that from 1997 to

1999, the average mall visit declined from one and a half hours to 40

minutes.10 Even the industry spokesgroup—the International Council of

Shopping Centers (ICSC)—admits that shopping is up on-line but down

at the malls.11

The result of these trends is most evocatively captured in the rise

of “ghost malls”—malls that have failed but are left standing. Perhaps the

most emblematic symbol of these trends is represented in a recent mall

failure. Sherman Oaks Galleria, a Los Angeles mall that epitomized shopping mall culture (and was featured in the movies Valley Girl and Fast

Times at Ridgemont High), has recently been emptied of stores and redone

as an office-retail complex.12 Michael Beyard, of the Urban Land

Institute, recently predicted that 15 to 20 percent of the 2,200 enclosed
41

shopping malls around the country will be obliged to close in the near

future.13

Some mall owners have responded by creating simplistic marketing attempts to build loyalty. They have offered “awards” to shoppers,

like prepaid phone cards, magazine subscriptions, and other free items.14

Others have suggested fighting mall vacancies by...merely attracting

newer, more lucrative forms of retail.15 But there also seems a general

recognition that the shopping mall needs to offer people something more. 

Making Malls Something More

Recently, leading developers have recognized the decline in shopping

center retail and have begun to experiment with ways to draw the public

back to the mall by delving into new forms of civic design and public

space. Despite significant differences, all these innovations involve diversifying and “complexifying” what has become an overly simplistic design

and retailing formula. 

An important diversifying initiative has been the Sony Corporation’s Metreon in San Francisco, developed for Sony by Millennium

Partners with architect Gary Handel.16 Metreon is an “urban entertainment destination,” which brings together shopping, eating, and

entertainment. Its design draws not only from the enclosed shopping center but from the theme park, from the urban festival marketplace

pioneered by James Rouse at Boston’s Faneuil Hall, and from the traditional urban street. The Metreon combines a dozen movie theaters, an

Imax theater, one-of-a-kind stores, and restaurants which replace traditional mall anchors and shops. While projects like Sony’s Metreon have

been emulated by competitors such as Disney and Dreamworks, the scale

of the project makes it a very expensive investment that requires a booming downtown with ample tourist traffic. Could the Metreon concept be

repackaged in a form that would be applicable to the inner-ring suburb?

Moreover, could such success in diversifying the mall be extended to

include genuine civic space?

In fact, there are numerous developers who have responded to citizens’ desires to make malls into community centers. The ICSC has
42

documented the inclusion of public libraries, chapels, community health

centers, and other public-minded institutions in malls.17 In his 1995 City

Life, Witold Rybczynski describes how the DeBartolo Corporation and

the Rouse Company have encouraged community activities in their malls.

Another initiative in this vein was the “Town Hall in the Mall” project in

Everett, Washington. An outreach center for City Hall in a shopping

mall, this experiment showed clear signs of civic success—for example, by

registering more people to vote than the City Hall downtown.18 An

increasing number of malls, including the huge Mall of America in

Minnesota, also contain educational facilities such as space for community

college courses and high school equivalency test training.

It should be recognized that these are random experiments, most

with little overall civic vision, done out of an immediate desire to fill

vacant stores. Many of the public functions such as libraries were not

even incorporated into the mall. They were ghettoized, tucked away in

some obscure corner where few shoppers would find them. Only the

exceptional work of a few innovators has really shown just what can be

done to address mall fatigue while also enhancing civic life.

Civic Innovators

A few developers have tried to incorporate more civic and community

space into shopping malls. In the 1980s, Ron Sher, developer of the Mall

at the Crossroads in Bellevue, Washington (outside of Seattle), purchased

a mall that had become a center of crime and drug dealing—a typical

example of a failing, inner-ring shopping center.19 The surrounding

neighborhood was dense and diverse but lacked any real downtown. Sher

believed the center could be revitalized if it adapted to the community.

Since there was already an upscale mall close by, which drew many highincome shoppers, Sher put in a mix of stores (including a grocery store)

that could be of use to local residents and encouraged community life.

Among its many activities, the mall sponsored live entertainment on

weekends, community candidate forums, and a children’s reading club.

Sher revitalized the mall by making it something more than a mere shopping center.20
43

Doug Storrs’ development of Mashpee Commons on Cape Cod

provides another example of civic innovation. Storrs acquired a well

located but run-down strip mall and revitalized it by using the New

England town as a model. Storrs transformed the strip mall into a new

development that included stores, offices, residential space, and a centrally located post office (which draws in pedestrians). In addition, a library,

church, school, police station and public squares are incorporated into the

overall plan. Storrs also planned the mall so that pedestrians from a newly

designed adjacent neighborhood could add to the mix of functions and

public spaces. Following the principles of higher density and mixed use,

Storrs literally built the mall into a new community.21

One of the most exciting retail transformations is taking place at

Willingboro Plaza in Willingboro, New Jersey. Originally built by

William Levitt during the 1950s, the town is today a predominantly

African American community, and its commercial corridor is marked by

dead strip malls. Although Willingboro Plaza backs directly onto the

town, it has become a “ghost mall” with 13 shuttered buildings on 56

acres.22 Recently, representatives from the state and local government,

architects, and Robert Stang, a civic-minded developer, have taken on the

responsibility to make Willingboro Plaza into a town center. The principal planner from the Burlington County Office of Land-Use and

Planning, Mark Remsa, developed an elaborate process of community

input and consensus building. Two architects, Bice Wilson of Meridian

Design and Randy Croxton of Croxton Collaborative Architects, drew up

New Seabury Shopping

Center, c. 1965, 

eventual site of 

Mashpee Commons.
44

Mashpee Commons in 

the 1990s.

Willingboro Plaza

existing condition.
45

plans based on the community meetings. Realizing that no big box stores

would locate at the Plaza, they concentrated on a mix of uses including

smaller retail, light industry, and—most importantly within this context—

civic and public space, including a library and a community college.23

Many other older malls around the country are being repositioned

and connected to their communities but, of course, skeptics will argue

that these exceptional examples are simply that—exceptions. And certainly there is reason to believe that the industry as a whole will continue

creating more ill-fated malls. Nonetheless, the broad trends look good.

An April 1999 survey of large malls under construction finds that fewer

than half of the 150 or so projects are single-use enclosed shopping centers surrounded by parking lots. Some malls are designed around open-air

“town centers,” with the parking carefully sited behind or beneath the

major buildings, and about a third of the projects include mixed uses such

as housing, libraries, and office space.24

Conclusion

In the end, the most persuasive argument for civic design rests on its 

own merits. As a democratic society, we need places where citizens can

congregate and associate with one another. Public space is a prerequisite

for a healthy civil society.25 But this sort of argument often sounds

abstract in the world of real estate and development. That is why it is

important to recognize that there are reasons to believe that more mall

developers will listen to arguments that malls must become multidimensional places, rather than one-dimensional conduits for shopping.

Developers are starting to learn that people are not just consumers but

also citizens. That is what makes the issue of the civic redesign of shopping centers so pertinent today. 
46

The sameness of the architecture and

interior design, and of the goods and

entertainment offered, no longer has the

excuse Howard Johnson and the Hilton once

offered the weary traveler: comforting

conformity in an otherwise alien world.

Sameness now is a matter of efficiency,

volume, and cultural homogeneity.

—Benjamin R. Barber
47

Case Studies

Few cities, towns, or suburbs have escaped the debilitating effects of

underused or vacant shopping centers. The case studies that follow offer

stories about some of the many places in which citizens, government officials, developers, and design and planning professionals have sought to

improve an older shopping center. These stories show the complex relationships among the wide variety of participants in the redevelopment

process and demonstrate the rewards and difficulties of repositioning

older centers. 

II
48
49

Repositioning the Older 

Shopping Mall

Marilyn Jordan Taylor Skidmore, Owings & Merrill

In a midsize city in the middle of America sit

two regional malls so close to each other that

they compete for the trips and dollars of the

regional population. As a result both are suffering. A developer decided to buy and redevelop

both malls, differentiating them in one way or

another in search of an unlikely win-win solution. For the first mall, he proposes to double

the number of anchors by raiding from the second mall. This strategy follows a tried and true,

if sometimes short-sighted, market dictum,

“grow to survive.” It also creates an interesting

problem for the second mall: how will its image,

use, and organization diverge from the first?

Among the interventions our firm has proposed

are selective demolition, the introduction of a

grid of streets (at approximately 300-foot centers), and the preservation of some of the

anchors. Cutting the mall into pieces introduces

new space for a civic plaza at the core of the

project and secondary plazas sprinkled elsewhere

on the site. New retail spaces, offices, theaters,

restaurants, and even residential uses provide

infill throughout the project and reinforce the

definition of the new streets. In terms of development and finance, cutting up the older mall

creates parcels of various sizes, which offer new

opportunities for multiple developers, builders,

and even owners. The new project, now a dense

arrangement of buildings, spaces, and uses, also

offers room for landscaping, sidewalks, and onstreet parking. Creating a new community and

joining with existing communities around it, this

transformed mall has the complex array of uses,

scales, and accessibility to provide for long-term

viability.

From this and other projects done by SOM, I

would like to suggest four strategies that utilize

existing buildings and infrastructure to reposition and revitalize older shopping centers in

inner suburban areas. The first strategy is

“externalizing.” Retail is perhaps the most

volatile land use for which we design today. 

The rate of change is increasing, life cycles are

shrinking, and electronic retailing is a hovering

cloud. In this retailing environment aging malls

must adapt. For architects and urban designers

this creates a great opportunity to recapture

large, isolated shopping center land holdings

and reintegrate them back into the settlement

fabric that has grown up around them in recent

decades. To do this we must break down the

massive scale of the mall and its infrastructure

and shift its orientation out towards its setting:

that is, the mall needs to be externalized. 

This means drawing from local grids rather 

than merely inserting limited access or one

Fountain Square, with

neither a square nor a

fountain.
50

directional roads, designing for the pedestrian

instead of the automobile, and finding new ways

of utilizing public transit. 

The second strategy to help reposition the shopping mall is “mixing and multiplying.” After five

or six decades of living with malls, it is evident

that their singular conceptualization is stultifying. Over time malls have grown more and more

like each other, and the same national stores

with the same merchandise and the same window displays are everywhere. How can we

change a half-century-old pattern that is increasingly difficult to sustain? How can we create a

mix? One way of achieving a lively arrangement

of building and use scales in direct proximity to

each other is to encourage varied parcel sizes.

This would create a new landscape for the retailing package. We also need what I would call “an

origination mix.” For example, no development

would have more than one-third national stores;

ideally at least a third would be local stores, and

the remaining third would be regional stores.

New and old centers would benefit from a mix

of owners, each of whose size and personality

could add to a sense of place. 

“Going green,” the third revitalization strategy

is less an ecological concept than the recognition

that people actually like to be out of doors.

Examples in warm climates abound but

Broadway—New York City’s (and my own) Main

Street—is crowded with pedestrians, used book

sellers, and sidewalk seating at virtually all times

of the year. Research has shown that a growing

number of creditworthy mall tenants are also

willing to locate in outdoor environments. Open

spaces and landscapes can become central organizing and social spaces instead of the leftovers

that they have become in recent years. In fact,

these spaces are often the elements around

which a community sense of ownership and

stewardship is formed.

Finally, the fourth strategy is adding transit. 

A few years ago my firm conducted a study for

New Jersey Transit titled “Planning for Transit

Friendly Land Use: A Primer for Communities.” Its intended audience was members of

the numerous citizen, voluntary, planning, and

zoning boards active throughout the state. The

New Jersey State Plan already encourages the

reuse of underutilized areas and was a catalyst

for the study. Our primer addressed land use,

cars, and community-friendly transit. We provided information about how to design transit to

be friendly to communities, as well as how to

design communities to be friendly to transit.

Transit is an incredibly varied and formative

type of infrastructure. We urged this strategy

partly out of antipathy to parking garages and

acres of asphalt, but more importantly, because

transit riders are pedestrians. For specific parts

of their journeys pedestrians interact in ways

that cars never can but that communities must.

Not only do pedestrians shop but they create the

links and conversations that form the core of

communities. Our study emphasized that successful development can take place only when

local communities assume a stewardship role in

defining and maintaining their open spaces,

their streets, and their commercial infrastructure. This is perhaps the essential element in the

repositioning of older shopping malls.
51

Continuum Partners is currently redeveloping

Lakewood Center, a midsize mall of about 1.4

million square feet built (on 100 acres) in 1965

in the city of Lakewood, outside of Denver.

Lakewood’s 13 private subdivisions incorporated

in 1969 to avoid being absorbed by the City of

Denver, then under a busing order. The new

city had no real cohesion or unity, the housing

stock was weak, and the residential tax base was

insufficient to properly provide services. At its

peak in the 1970s, the Lakewood shopping center provided as much as 50 percent of the city’s

tax base, but it declined in the 1990s as the

region was saturated with retail competitors. 

The Lakewood site offered a potentially complex valuation problem for our company because

the property had a split ownership. One entity

owned the land and another owned the buildings. Yet this situation worked to our advantage

because the owner of the ground lease offered a

highly discounted price just to get the project

moving. In other words, since the land was what

generated the value of the property instead of

the buildings, we could come to terms and

acquire control of the property more easily. 

Lakewood’s existing lease and building conditions, on the other hand, presented hurdles to

implementation. The center’s four department

stores were all anemic retailers by the mid1990s, but the store owners continued to

exercise long-term control over the property.

When the original center was built, department

stores had the clout to demand lease riders and

extensive control over management issues.

Today, this means that we can’t change the color

of the stripes in the parking lot without the 

May Company’s permission and that Toys-R-Us

has a 12-acre no-build zone around their store.

These encumbrances severely limit flexibility in

reworking a project and can hold up the process

for years since the department stores have

learned how to wait for lucrative settlements.

Instead, we received a commitment from the

city that they would use eminent domain to

remove these encumbrances. Lakewood is now

(or will soon be) home to several successful

commercial projects such as a large, outletbased “Mills”-type mall (made famous by places

like Potomac Mills, etc.); the city decided to

divert some of the revenue from these projects

to help finance changes at Lakewood Center. 

Villa Italia, Lakewood, Colorado

Mark Falcone Continuum Partners

Villa Italia, artist’s rendering.
52

Central to this kind of long-term deal making is

Lakewood’s strong city manager and supportive

council.

Two design firms competed for the renovation

of the mall at Lakewood. The architectural

firms RTKL and Alkus Manfredi each gave us

two schemes, and we paid each of them to

develop one scheme further. In the end, we

decided to hire Alkus Manfredi based on the

firm’s ideas and creativity, as well as the chemistry of the relationship. In addition, we put

together a citizens advisory group to be our

critical link to and support-builder in the community. Eventually, we will conduct charettes

and other meetings to insure local input and

because we believe that the community can be a

source for new ideas and solutions.

The new Lakewood redevelopment known as

Villa Italia will be a mixed-use “downtown” 

for a suburban community that up to now has

lacked a commercial center. After weighing 

different proportions of use types that met the

needs of the local market, we decided that the

2.8 million square feet of new construction

would include office, retail, and residential components. Another 1.5 million square feet will be

dedicated to parking—more than half of which

will be in garages. The street grid of the area

surrounding the site, which had stopped at 

the perimeter of the mall parking lot, will be

extended through the site to better link the site

into the surrounding community. The buildings

in the new project will be largely traditional in

design because other vocabularies would not

work for this specific site and community. Our

company is using more contemporary architecture in other markets in the region.

The city of Lakewood also has a large-scale plan

into which our project fits. The site is adjacent

to a recently constructed civic center. Across the

street from the mall, the city built a new city

hall and library to the rear of an older strip center (not the best solution but they had to get the

projects moving after years of delay). On a

street adjacent to the mall (a street that also

leads out of Denver), we have asked the city to

implement a boulevard project. We want to

transform the fabric and density of the street to

make it more dramatic. In addition, and perhaps

more importantly, we want the city to zone a

400-foot setback for redevelopment. With a

zoning change of this magnitude, it would be

possible to assemble properties, add new uses,

and dramatically improve the area. Continuum

is confident that Lakewood Center will work at

both local and regional scales and that both the

mall and the neighborhood will prosper. 

Villa Italia, site plan.
53

Two Malls, Kettering, Ohio 

Marilou W. Smith City of Kettering

Andrew Aidt City of Kettering

Kettering is a first-ring city of Dayton, Ohio,

with a population of 60,000 people. Two older

shopping malls in our area are both in deteriorating condition: the Hills and Dales Shopping

Center and the Van Buren Shopping Center. 

Hills and Dales was built in the southwestern

part of the city in the late 1950s. It is a onestory, 250,000-square-foot building designed

around an interior courtyard. The original center was home to retailers including grocery

stores, furniture stores, and several large nightclubs. The 22-acre center is located at a major

intersection through which, currently, about

20,000 cars pass each day. Although it is very

close to a major highway (I-75), there is no 

local access. 

Hills and Dales began to decline in the 1980s,

and in 1996, it was sold. The owners tried 

to lease the center and also worked with the

Planning Commission and City Council to 

create a special zoning district to allow for 

redevelopment. A new roadway and new 

landscaping were recommended by a county

organization called Economic Development 

and Government Equity (EDGE), which also

would fund the improvements. Despite these

efforts, the center is vacant and the city has been

losing $150,000 in tax revenues per year.

The owners recently approached the city about

buying the land, and after much debate in the

City Council and considerable worry about

whether taxpayers wanted the city to enter into

the marketplace, we purchased the center for

$1.7 million from our general fund and paid for

demolition. We sent out a prospectus to sell the

property, but the response was disappointing.

We sent out a request for qualifications from

architects to help us redesign the site, and there

has been considerable interest. In the meantime,

we’re trying to market the site for sale and hope

to develop it with a local or national developer,

in whole or in parts.1

Van Buren Shopping Center is a single-story

structure built during the late 1960s in the

northeastern part of the city on a major thoroughfare. It was home to major retailers and a

local high-end department store, as well as

smaller retailers like Hallmark, a beauty salon,

Hills and Dales Shopping Center.
54

Hills and Dales Shopping Center.

Hills and Dales Shopping Center.

Van Buren Shopping Center.

Van Buren Shopping Center.
55

and other services. It also has a bank and a post

office and is close to a large manufacturing

plant, a large apartment complex, and a business

park, a redevelopment of a former defenseindustry operation. 

The Van Buren Shopping Center started to

decline in the 1980s and is mostly vacant now,

except for the post office, the bank, and a few

small retailers. The site needs to be redeveloped,

but there are property disputes and we are considering the use of eminent domain to settle the

issue and redevelop the property. 

The city feels that the site should be used for a

neighborhood-focused, mixed-use development

supported by the local residential community,

but the current owner has been seeking to

upgrade the property with higher-end retail.

Unfortunately, a market study we conducted

shows that such upgrading is not viable in this

location as the area is over-retailed. We need to

find other, more creative, community-based uses

for the site to avoid the drastic and costly action

of demolition used at Hills and Dales. Subsidies

are available at the state level for infrastructure

improvements, or the city might be willing to

trade the land for the right development proposal that included uses such as a public park. New

housing is another option since there is great

local demand, but the tax revenue generated

from residential development is substantially less

than commercial development.

With Hills and Dales, we were lucky that we

could to acquire a property and absorb the cost

of demolition to create a vacant piece of land.

Unfortunately, we cannot do this again at Van

Buren Shopping Center. As in many cities and

towns across the country, we are left with the

more typical situation of a semi-abandoned

shopping center. The market is slow to see the

opportunities in such places, but we hope that

with continued publicity and some public subsidy, we can bring life back to these centers. 

Demolition at Hills and Dales shopping center.
56

...successful development can take place only

when local communities assume a stewardship

role in defining and maintaining their open spaces,

their streets, and their commercial infrastructure.

This is perhaps the essential element in the

repositioning of older shopping malls.

—Marilyn Jordan Taylor
57

Redevelopment: Projects, 

Strategies, Research

Architectural, planning, and design solutions for contemporary urban or

suburban problems are never uniform. The built and unbuilt projects that

follow draw from a wide range of proposals by architects, planners, and

landscape architects for the use and reuse of public and private spaces.

Not all the work is targeted for the suburban shopping center but is

instead taken from a variety of situations and sites that highlight possibilities for reuse. The selected projects focus on the relationships among

stores, homes, offices, community facilities, parking, open and public

space, and local and regional infrastructures. The work includes both

horizontal, low-lying solutions and vertical, land-use-intensive arrangements. This collection of strategies offers many lessons for architectural

practice in general and provides a library of ideas for those looking for

ways to rethink and redesign older shopping centers.

III
58
59

Urban Elements

Michael Rotondi RoTo Architects, Inc., Los Angeles

Mann’s Chinese Theater

Hollywood Boulevard was once a very social

place, filled with crowds strolling, going to

movie theaters, eating in cafes or shopping. 

The boulevard functioned as a typical Main

Street shaped by buildings and façades but it 

was also informed by cross axes of walkways,

alleys, arcades, courtyards, and an occasional

staircase. At the center of the busy scene was

Mann’s Chinese Theater. Visited by six million

people per year, the Theater is still the heart of

the district, but the average boulevard visit is

now only 20 minutes. Half of the visitors are

dropped off in buses behind the theater and 

have no sense of participating in the life or 

history of the street. 

The clients have been a part of the Hollywood

community for many years and sought a 

building that could add to rather than mimic 

or replace the cultural and architectural significance of the theater. The project links the

parking areas to the rear of the theater, the

courtyard of the existing building, and the 

sidewalk and street, creating a new set of relationships between the site and the existing

building. It reinterprets the forms and social life

that once flourished on the boulevard to create 

a new social space for residents and tourists. 
60
61

Warehouse C, Nagasaki,

Japan, 1997

Warehouse C at Nagasaki’s new Motofuno

Wharf is a transfer and distribution point for

goods coming into and out of the port. The

entire wharf, constructed in 1994, sits on a large

landfill that projects 1000 feet into the bay. It is

used by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries (MHI), one

of the largest ship builders in the world, as well

as the Mitsubishi Trading Company and numerous builders and industrial concerns. The

building celebrates the port entry to the city and

addresses the public prominence and role of

shipping in the economic and social life of the

region. The site also offers a unique vantage

point from which the mountains, the city, and

the bay can all be seen.

The location and size of the warehouse offered

an opportunity to explore public uses and spaces

alongside the private shipping functions that

form the bulk of the program. The base building

is an inexpensive and standardized concrete

frame with dimensions predetermined by MHI

at 1000 feet long, 80 feet wide, and 50 feet high.

This vast roof length and area, as well as the

views to and from the building, became the 

basis for a public garden called the Dragon

Promenade. The additional programming was

made possible by the money saved in the construction of the warehouse space. The publicly

accessible promenade changes shape gradually

yet continuously across the length of the building and forms part of what will become a larger

pedestrian network.
62
63

Three Landscapes

Glenn Allen Hargreaves Associates, San Francisco

University of Cincinnati

Over the course of the 20th century, the

University of Cincinnati has transformed into 

an inhospitable environment planned in an ad

hoc manner and always oriented around the

automobile. The campus organization and operation no longer contribute to the interactions

that shape healthy student life. Confronting the

necessity for more growth and a clear need to

address the lack of spatial coherence, the university required a longer-term strategy. The heart

of the reorganization reclaims a series of public

open spaces and pedestrian pathways to unify

the campus. 

Devising a new site plan and reorienting the

campus for the pedestrian required relocating

parking to garages at the edges of the campus

and diverting service roads to secondary networks. In addition, decades-old buildings

intended for temporary use were removed to

restore the original campus quadrangle. With

these new spaces created or found, the geometries of the site plan could generate a series 

of linked and recognizable open spaces and

quadrangles that together form a network for

campus-wide connections. The pedestrian can

walk from the old historic center of the university through a ravine and across the rest of

the campus. 

The Main Street Project, part of the overall

plan, provides a series of urban spaces and links

the old quadrangle to the new Campus Green,

previously an 11-acre parking lot.

The new chain of green spaces leads to a major

outdoor space called the University Commons,

which invites the local community into the campus and uses land forms to create a variety of

active and changing places. 

Through a series of new or reclaimed public

spaces, the plan of the University of Cincinnati

is able to shift the perception of the campus and

provide it with a network of places that promote

community life.
64

Sydney 2000 Olympics

The Olympic site is well located at the center of

the metropolitan region, but it suffered from

many years of abuse. It had been home to the

New South Wales State Abattoir, the largest

slaughterhouse in the southern hemisphere; the

State Brick Works, which created a massive

crater; and the major garbage dumping ground

for the city of Sydney. Adding to these complex

existing conditions were the massive number

and variety of sports facilities required for the

games and the festivities. This situation forced

the Olympic Coordination Authority to confront an amorphous spatial and landscape

condition.

The site design for the Olympics needed to

address the short-term needs of an expected

600,000 visitors per day during the games, as

well as long-term, post-Olympics social life. 

The planning process involved the collaboration

of the Coordination Authority, the city, public

agencies, and representatives of surrounding

communities. The design is organized by three

overlapping parts. First, an enormous, linear

plaza ties everything together at the heart of 

the site. Second, a landscape layer links the site

to surrounding park lands, creates parks within

the site, and ties the pedestrian system together.

Finally, a pair of water features, one at the high

point of the site and one where the site meets

surrounding swamps and wetlands, celebrates

the transformation of the site into a new town

center for the western suburbs of Sydney.

The design ideas derive from the specificities

and needs of the place. The geometries of the

plaza come from overlaying the historical and

current grids of the area, and the material colors

come from the colors of the Australian earth. 

At the northern end of the site is a manmade

wetland built by relocating and recapping the

garbage dump to create a series of interlocking

ponds and marshes that join the surrounding

landscape. It also serves as a holding pond for

storm water runoff, and works as a cleaning

marsh to recycle water that is then used to irrigate the rest of the site. 
65
66
67

Louisville, Kentucky 

The city of Louisville asked for design ideas to

reuse and reclaim its abandoned and forgotten

industrial waterfront. The city’s rise to prominence was based on the Ohio River’s shipping

role in the regional economy, but the railroad

and the highway shifted attention away from the

waterfront. In addition, the highway physically

severed the relation of the downtown from the

waterfront and made it totally inaccessible. 

The master plan reconnected the waterfront to

the downtown. The city formed a Waterfront

Agency composed of local agencies and public

developers that used private and public financing

to acquire 125 acres of land parcels along the 

river. Surface roads were rerouted around the

park to make it accessible and usable. The new

parkland carried the river edge into the city

from the east end of the site as a bucolic rural

park. After crossing under the freeway, the 

river edge is transformed into a 12-acre great

Lawn that serves as an urban park for the downtown. The Lawn is highly programmed with

playgrounds, retail areas, a plaza for the annual

Derby Festival, and restaurants, as well as an

amphitheater infrastructure. A 1000-foot-long

fountain begins downtown, runs through the

Lawn, and empties into the Ohio River. 
68
69

Mixed Uses, Mixed Masses, 

Mixed Finances

Gary Handel Gary Edward Handel + Associates, New York

Lincoln Square, New York City

Programmatic invention is perhaps the most

profound means by which new interventions and

redevelopment projects can transform their

neighborhoods. The Lincoln Square project is a

four-phase, 1.8 million-square-foot complex that

has been underway since 1990 when the city’s

real estate recession gave rise to the need for

creative ways to program and tenant new development. The project was made viable by the

incorporation of big box stores, cineplexes, or

recreational facilities that had first emerged in

the suburbs and were now looking to enter

urban residential markets. These new uses dramatically changed the residential development

process and helped get the projects financed. 

The scale, shape, and street relations of the

Lincoln Square building were transformed by

the large volume needs of the commercial tenants. The building offers a new approach for

residential building in dense neighborhoods by

lifting the first apartment floor 150 feet into the

air, providing excellent views and light. The base

of the building consists of several levels of

retail—one at grade and two below grade— 

and three levels of movie theaters above. Other

uses that bring life to the complex include a

multilevel, 140,000-square-foot sports club and a

dormitory facility for J. P. Morgan. In effect, the

building is a kind of platform for in-town living,

a “density buster” shaped by a large quantity of

intense programming. 

The movie theater complex is also positioned in

an innovative way. The theater lobby faces the

street, and its vertically oriented space is filled

with people moving on each floor and up and

down the escalators. The volume of the lobby,

separated from the street by a huge glass wall,

brings the hustle and bustle of urban life into

the building. 
70

The Metreon, San Francisco

The Sony Metreon complex is a new addition to

the Yerba Buena complex in use and in form.

The new 400,000-square-foot building evolved

from the focus on large-scale retail and entertainment in a dense urban neighborhood seen in

projects such as Lincoln Square in New York.

The building opens up through a broad glass

wall to connect visitors to the activities and

sights of the Yerba Buena Gardens. The

Metreon also has multiple entry points to

increase the ease of access to the many levels of

the gardens, as well as to Fourth Street on the

other side of the building. As at Lincoln Square,

inward-facing elements of the program are shifted to the outside. 

A clear and consistent public policy framework

was an integral feature of making the Metreon

project possible. The San Francisco Redevelopment Agency (SFRA) and other communitybased agencies have been working on the 

87-acre Yerba Buena site for over 30 years. 

The agency has acquired the land through condemnations, government grants, and outright

purchasing, and it uses the sale of public property to private developers to pay for capital

improvements that enable the construction of

public buildings. SFRA leases other properties

to developers and uses the rents to subsidize the

capital operating deficits of the nonprofit institutions. This model of public-private partnership

uses the energy and enthusiasm of the private

sector to subsidize public sector goals and has

been remarkably successful.

Yerba Buena Gardens has become a new cultural

nucleus within the city. Among the public institutions in the area are the Yerba Buena Center

for the Arts, the San Francisco Museum of

Modern Art, a performing arts center, and a

children’s museum; the Jewish Museum San

Francisco, designed by architect Daniel

Liebeskind, and the Mexican Museum, designed

by Ricardo Legorreta, are in the planning stages.

SFRA has also participated in the development

of the Moscone Convention Center, three

hotels, and upwards of 1000 units of housing.

With complex and mixed programming, as well

as the clear and long-term participation of public agencies, redevelopment projects can become

vital public places. The Metreon, like Lincoln

Square in New York City, shows a definitive

shift from traditional urban and suburban design

approaches that internalize retail and entertainment functions toward an approach that makes

these activities visible from the outside. This

work trusts the viability of existing streets and

places for access, density, and activity. The shopper or visitor does not need to be in a separate

world but instead can participate in the multiple

activities that shape urban life. 
71
72

Stripscape, Phoenix, Arizona.
73

Reassembling the Strip and 

Building around the Big Box

Darren Petrucci Arizona State University and 

A-I-R (Architecture-Infrastructure-Research) Inc. 

Stripscape: 7th Avenue

Corridor, Phoenix, Arizona

Stripscape is a revitalization strategy for integrating 7th Avenue, a commercial corridor in

Phoenix, with its surrounding neighborhoods. It

is based on a strategy of placing new elements

into the existing structures and spaces of the commercial landscape. Potentially operating at the

scale of a store or an entire mall, the additions of

Stripscape form a public network by combining

culture, work, living, and leisure activities.

In Stripscape, private commercial improvements

by the local merchants are integrated with a public pedestrian infrastructure provided by the

municipality. Existing underutilized right-of-ways,

alleyways, utility easements, water retention areas,

and required setbacks along property lines are

reused as public and private pedestrian areas connecting sidewalks to service alleys, parking lots,

and the neighborhood beyond. Uses along the

new landscape infrastructures are “time

managed,” allowing public and private users to

occupy the same spaces at different times of the

day, week, or year. 

Pavilions Power Center, Pima

Maricopa Indian Reservation,

Scottsdale, Arizona

The Pavilions Power Center is part of the trend

in big box retailing toward increasingly large

building complexes. The existing mall consists of

a ring of buildings at the edges of the site composed of big box stores with long-term, 20-year

leases, separated by smaller shops with shortterm, 10-year leases. This project accepts the

economic and marketing practices that shaped

this type of shopping center but over time

increases the building density of the site from 25

percent to 75 percent. The new elements that are

added include housing, offices, and cultural facilities that are built on raised sections of parking

structures with new small-scale retailing located

below. Placing smaller stores nearer to the parking areas and the new public programming

between the large stores helps to create a more

pedestrian-friendly environment. In addition, the

parking areas are transformed through landscaping into smaller-scale parking courts.

Pavilions Power Center, Scottsdale, Arizona.
74
75

A Vertical Mixed-Use Suburb

Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Paul Lewis, Mark Tsurumaki, David Lewis, New York

This project explores the impact on contemporary suburban culture of combining large-scale

retail operations such as shopping centers and

big box stores with the single-family house. The

joining of these suburban building types creates

efficient land use, sharing existing infrastructures, and reduces overall transportation needs

while maintaining the patterns and social life of

the suburb. Building houses on the vast roofs of

retailing centers mitigates horizontal suburban

sprawl and offers new opportunities for social

interaction. In effect, the house and the store

maintain their conventional uses, programs, and

circulations while allowing new connections to

the surrounding community.

The two building systems—the retail and 

the residential—share structural and service

walls that also create the property lines for 

each house. These walls contain the necessary

equipment for domestic life—appliances, 

cabinetry, fixtures—and provide usable areas

between the houses for hedges, trees, and 

barbecues, reproducing a traditional suburban

social pattern of overlapping private and social

space. The new roofscape enables residents to

enjoy a comfortable suburban lifestyle of indoor

and outdoor spaces.
76
77

VMall: Vertical Density

SHoP Christopher R. Sharples, William W. Sharples, Coren D. Sharples, 

Kimberly J. Holden, Gregg A. Pasquarelli, New York

VMall, Flushing, New York

VMall packs a large, typically suburban program

onto a small site in an increasingly dense neighborhood. Located in an area of New York City

where retailing and commercial needs have not

been met by typical development approaches,

VMall introduces a mix of program elements the

community needs and can sustain. The project

houses a large neighborhood-based supermarket,

five small restaurants, 40 commercial condominium offices, and parking for 200 cars. VMall

also adapts to the specific features of the site. A

10-foot grade change from the front to the rear

of the site connects a major commercial arterial

boulevard to a residential zone. The programmatic and site conditions suggested a design that

turns the typical strip mall on its side. The commercial spaces of the mall are stacked over the

parking levels, and a vertical interior passageway

is inserted through the project. This organization allows a variety of uses and activities to be

seen at the entry and thus serves both pedestrians and automobile-based visitors.

An atrium visually and physically connects 

the retail areas, the office floors, and the 

parking area below grade, as well as a miniature

golf course on the upper level. The shaped 

surfaces of this volume display advertisements

for the shops and act as orientation devices 

within the space.
78

Design Competitions as Catalysts

Rosalie Genevro The Architectural League of New York

Competitions, in all their various forms, are a

very useful way to investigate alternative

approaches and new possibilities in architecture

and design. They are often used as an openended, explorative process, to elicit new ideas

and perspectives when a building type is in 

flux or has become obsolete, or when an evolving form of social life has not yet become

connected to a specific architectural or urban

type. The reuse of older shopping centers raises

all these issues.

Two very ambitious and fairly recent European

projects suggest how complicated urban design

issues can benefit from the competition process.

In Ireland, a historic but dilapidated section of

Dublin was slated to be demolished to make way

for construction of a major transportation terminal. The city took years to assemble the land

and, in the interim, properties were rented out

at low prices to artists and other groups who

eventually formed an organized community.

Before the terminal went ahead, a competition

was organized to come up with other ways to

develop the area. The competition was won by a

consortium of young architects, who proposed a

precise, fine-grained strategy for the entire area,

in which new buildings and outdoor gathering

places would be inserted at strategic points.

Design guidelines were developed for the reuse

of the historic fabric as well. The community 

of artists and a local development corporation

convinced the city to adopt this scheme and

managed the development of the project. 

Today Temple Bar, as the area is called, is one 

of the most visited cultural tourist destinations

in Europe.

Another competition of note took place in the

Ruhr Valley, once the great steel producing area

of Germany but long since in decline. The area

was environmentally devastated by years of

heavy manufacturing and mining, followed by

economic decline and high unemployment, making for a very bleak situation. The state

government decided in the 1980s to create what

it called an International Building Exposition as

a revitalization strategy. In Germany, earlier

building expositions usually entailed the construction of model housing, so the focus on an

abandoned manufacturing district was unusual.

A number of design competitions were held to

commission development on specific sites.

Among the competitions was one for a park

called Landscape Park Duisberg North, which

was won by the Munich-based landscape architect Peter Latz. Latz proposed to leave the

industrial installations in place as ruins and to

interweave them with newly designed public

landscapes. Designed to be installed over several

years, the park has groves of trees that help 

purify the toxic soil, a public plaza called 

Piazza Metallica (made from large steel plates

scavenged from other buildings), former storage

tanks now filled with water and used by the 

local diving team, rock climbing walls, and 

many other recreational and cultural uses. 

The abandoned site has been transformed in 

a very inventive manner, but without any 

erasure of its industrial history. The park has

become extremely popular with the surrounding

communities. 

The lesson of competitions or design studies

such as these is that they are not simply a way 

to solve a particular problem but can also be

educational tools. They serve as collective investigative enterprises. They benefit architects by

offering them a chance to explore ideas, sites,

and conditions and also benefit the public. The

process educates all the participants, informs and

engages the public, and, potentially, makes the

ground more fertile for higher aspirations in

design. The best competitions raise awareness 

of the relationship between design and the life 

of communities.
79

Development Issues 

and Problems 

The last word in shopping center reuse goes to those engaged in the

financial, regulatory, planning, and political nuts and bolts of

development. The participants in these discussions have extensive local

and national experience in building, financing, and observing shopping

centers in inner suburbs. Their discussion makes clear that there is no

single formula for how shopping centers should be redeveloped nor 

for how the issue of public space should enter into the debate.

Considerable breadth of opinion exists on the proper roles of bankers,

lenders, developers, politicians, and administrators, as well as design 

and planning professionals. It becomes evident that design professionals

and clients can only benefit from embracing and integrating these 

matters into their work.

IV
80

For communities that depend on sales tax

revenues for essential services, the

problem can be a fiscal disaster. As the

malls deteriorate, they often pull down

their surrounding neighborhoods.

—Richard B. Peiser 

Will Fleissig

Martin Zogran
81

From Shopping Centers 

to Village Centers 

Richard B. Peiser Harvard University 

Will Fleissig Continuum Partners

Martin Zogran Harvard University

There is no lack of underutilized property within the built-up areas of

most American cities. Some of the best examples of underutilized properties are the first- and second-generation shopping centers located

throughout the U.S. Most of these properties are 20 to 35 years old and

tend to be located inside the first suburban ring of a region. They typically have been made obsolete by newer, more modern facilities in the

second and third suburban rings around many cities. 

Many older or abandoned malls could be converted to more stable

long-term use if there were mechanisms to accelerate redevelopment.

Such tools would help many towns struggling with large nonproductive

properties that provide ever-decreasing tax revenues and are often located

in highly visible sites within their communities. Conversion would also

make available a significant inventory of large infill sites for denser and

more compact development.

Many inner-ring shopping centers occupy relatively large sites for

their locations, are typically adjacent to arterial streets that provide excellent access, and are often served by existing bus routes. The typical

scenario for these “grayfield” or decaying malls is to slowly deteriorate
82

over a 10–15 year period, while experiencing increased vacancy and

reduced rents from a mix of discount retailers and backroom offices. In

addition, surrounding commercial properties lose customers and often

move to other locations, thus compounding the loss of activity, sales taxes,

and jobs near the mall site. For communities that depend on sales tax revenues for essential services, the problem can be a fiscal disaster. As the

malls deteriorate, they often pull down their surrounding neighborhoods.

Several fundamental hurdles need to be addressed in order to realize the redevelopment potential of under performing malls. 

The Department Store Lease Encumbrance

Many existing mall tenants have leases that contain restrictions on

changes to the physical layout of the mall without the tenant’s approval

even after the store has gone dark. In some situations, these restrictive

covenants have stymied redevelopment for years. The larger department

stores use their ability to block redevelopment in order to increase their

leverage for future rent concessions, to protect their capital investments,

and to keep competition away from the redesigned center.

The “Do Nothing” Scenario

In many cases, the owners are better off holding on to and neglecting the

property, since it has already created incredible returns on their original

equity investment made 15–20 years earlier. The preferred strategy is

often simply to obtain rents that cover real estate taxes and minimal operating expenses. Eventually, another investor may offer cash for the land

value of the mall, creating a substantial incentive for the original investor

who has already depreciated the value of the building asset. The location

and accessibility of many older malls make them viable candidates for

offices, residential development, hotels, and new retail formats. 
83

The Dollar Gap

Private investors make up more than 60 percent of grayfield mall ownership, as opposed to the insurance companies, pension funds, or real estate

investment trusts (REITs) that own more recent malls. If these individuals

were to give back the mall asset to their lender because of rising vacancies

and lowered rents, a taxable event would be triggered, causing them to

owe millions of dollars of federal taxes. A lender who takes possession of

the property will want to recover as much of the book value as possible,

which can often be achieved by leasing the property to backroom office

operations or other uses, but this often draws out the devaluation process.

It is likely to be several years before the property becomes available for

land value only.

The Need for Aggressive City Leadership

Strong municipal leadership is essential in working with potential redevelopers of older malls. This civic leadership begins with elected officials,

city managers, and citizen boards, and extends to city staff, community

organizations, and nearby resident associations. Using urban renewal

powers and public financing to demolish obsolete structures, create new

roads and parking facilities, construct civic or cultural buildings, and

enhance the streetscape and pedestrian system are typical tasks for the

public partner in such a project. The benefits of participating lead to the

removal of empty and unsightly buildings, stem the decline of surrounding activities, increase tax revenues, create new neighborhoods that offer a

variety of housing types and employment, and establish a sense of civic

pride in the community.
84

Public-private partnerships are key

ingredients in moving projects along.

Probably 95 percent of the projects

done by most lenders involve some sort

of public financing from a variety of

different sources such as loan

guarantees, tax relief, or other grants.

—Joseph F. Reilly
85

Roundtable: Obstacles 

to Development

Mark Falcone Continuum Partners

Joseph F. Reilly J. P. Morgan Chase Community 

Development Corporation

Ron Sher Terranomics 

Donald R. Zuchelli ZHA, Inc.

Benjamin R. Barber Walt Whitman Center for the Culture 

and Politics of Democracy, Rutgers University

The transformation of declining or abandoned shopping centers is largely

an economic problem. The redevelopment of these centers depends on

the criteria, analyses, and the decision-making processes of financial institutions. At the same time, turning older shopping centers into viable and

successful public spaces also depends on how these financial players interact with governmental, design, planning, and community participants.

This complex and potentially volatile mix of players means that “doing

the numbers” for the public-private partnerships that are typically used

for large-scale redevelopment projects needs to be understood and interpreted by a wide range of participants. The following discussion among

three developers, an economist, and a political scientist provides a

detailed picture of the different priorities and needs of the financial community and how they affect the development process. 
86

Mark Falcone

My company often looks at declining or closed shopping centers and we

have formulated several criteria for evaluation that might be instructive in

understanding how the redevelopment system works and how it might

change. 

First, an investor or developer needs to understand the asset base

and the valuation the current owner has against a desired property. What

is it really worth? Many of the shopping centers built in the 1960s and

1970s are owned by institutional lenders, utility companies, or pension

funds. The more recent generation of malls are generally owned by real

estate investment trusts (REITs). The earlier properties, and therefore

their investors, are in trouble because newer, larger malls opened nearby

and drew more customers. The early malls fought back by expanding,

adding new anchors, or doing multi-million dollar renovations. In most

instances, these changes did not substantially improve sales. An older mall

in this situation might therefore be worth $70 or $80 million on paper,

but the real market value of such a complex is substantially less, and in

some cases, the market value is just the value of the land. This gap in

value can take years to depreciated or write off, and no lender is going to

accept this scale of paper value. In some cases, owners find innovative

ways to draw out the process of decline, for instance, by putting backoffice operations into an old department store. But often this is a way of

postponing the inevitable asset devaluation until a buyer can be found and

other investors will take the inevitable hit. Current evaluation is therefore

critical for a new investor. 

Second, an investor requires an evaluation of the encumbrances

that come with a piece of property: existing leases, contracts, easements,

and other arrangements that could reduce a developer’s capacity to 

reposition the shopping center. At many older shopping centers built

when the retail climate was different, the department store owners could

demand lease and other land use concessions from the developers.

Locked-in signage issues, no-build zones, guaranteed parking spaces, and

other management rules create insurmountable hurdles in the repositioning process. Unless a developer can buy off these encumbrances or pay
87

for endless litigation, municipalities need to use their public authority to

make sure a troubled project does not sit idle as they wait for distant store

owners to reach a settlement: even a dark store can hold up a project 

for years.

Third, if a developer wants to provide a project with civic space

and activities, public reinvestment through bond issues, tax districts, or

other methods is necessary. Only public money can move a project

beyond what private capital can provide. In some instances, this could

also mean that a city will need to direct revenue streams from one successful commercial or industrial project in order to jump start another. 

Fourth, an investor or developer needs to see the commitment of

strong municipal leadership. Part of the reason that older suburban shopping centers are in such a sorry state is that suburban municipalities have

historically looked solely at the bottom line. There was no long-term

thinking. Cities have more typically taken leadership roles and political

risks and backed large-scale projects. Suburban redevelopment projects

need the support and confidence of public agencies and elected officials. 

Finally, everyone involved in redevelopment needs access to alternative ways of doing things and needs to exchange information and ideas.

My banker recently showed me a two-level Kohl store, a design which I

did not know about. It was very instructive. So in Colorado, I can sit

down with another Kohl representative and show him a precedent that

works. But this information must also be accessible to suburban planning

boards and other relevant groups, which often don’t have experience or

background in reuse projects. 

Joseph F. Reilly

In complex reuse projects the developer and the public official need to

keep in mind what features of a development project would encourage the

banker to provide financing. 

The leasing of the project is vital and is related to both the construction financing and the permanent financing. Banks making the

construction loan are not interested in the long haul: they want to be 

paid off at the completion of construction. By examining the leasing of a
88

project, these banks try to determine if it can satisfy the secondary lending market or a permanent lender at the end of construction. In other

words, the developer needs to have enough signed leases to carry the

costs of building the project. Additional public space in a project does not

produce revenue, so the financing becomes more difficult and in one

form or another, the commercial portions of the project must subsidize

the space. Lenders are also attracted by the potential for flexible reuse of

property. Looking at the worst case scenario, lenders want to know what

will happen to a project if it fails. A property will have more value to a

bank if there is a cost-effective way to use a property in some other form

than originally planned. 

Community involvement and community ownership can be

important in the underserved neighborhoods where older shopping 

centers are typically found. Community-based nonprofit partnerships 

or ownership have access to forms of public financing not available to the

private builder. This kind of money can make a huge difference in moving a project forward and can ensure that the benefits of reuse projects

stay in the community. Community developers can also make smallbusiness loans and keep money local. Most large banks invest in thirdparty entities who use state-sponsored tax credit methods of financing 

to make these small loans. In recent years, the volume of tax credit 

loans has become cost-effective as well as lucrative and has helped many

communities. 

Jobs are also critical from a neighborhood point of view. The

Community Reinvestment Act brings the banker and the community

together to create construction and staffing jobs. In federally sanctioned

Empowerment Zones, such as the Upper Manhattan Empowerment

Zone in Harlem, the law stipulates that a certain number of jobs be provided to people from the community. The boundaries of these zones are

often arbitrary, and eligibility shifts from one side of the street to the

other; this on-the-ground situation can cause a certain amount of friction

but, nevertheless, the jobs are created. 

From a design point of view, there are several issues that banks

tend to look for. In recent years, it has become apparent that projects 
89

that use less interior space and use the street for public interaction and

gathering are sensible and cost-effective. Harlem USA, a new urban 

mall, is designed as a movie theater wrapped with shops on the street, 

and it works well in that particular location. Once inside, people in 

New York are very comfortable going upstairs or taking escalators, so 

you can also utilize second-floor commercial space. These features have

made the project extremely successful, and street orientations have

proven their viability.

Public-private partnerships are key ingredients in moving projects

along. Probably 95 percent of the projects done by most lenders involve

some sort of public financing from a variety of different sources such as

loan guarantees, tax relief, or other grants. These kinds of subsidies

remove some of the risk involved in complex reuse projects and encourage the usually conservative banking community to participate.

At the heart of any financial participation is the question of when

and how to involve the banker. It may or may not be a good idea to

involve a banker early. If you have the right banker with a long-term

interest in a project, then early participation can add value. In contrast, a

banker who is involved for just a two-year construction phase will have a

minimal role. It often depends on the relationship between a developer

and a specific banker or institution. Incremental approaches in which

parts of a larger project are implemented separately or at different times

are difficult for a construction lender to finance. If a bank has already

originated a loan that can be sold in the secondary market or to a pension

fund, changing the loan is not an easy task. Smaller banks that hold and

service their own loans might be more willing to work incrementally, but

many banks are finding it increasingly difficult to make smaller loans in

general. The ongoing consolidation of the financial industry has aggregated deposits and decision making. In other words, there are fewer and

fewer lenders who understand local market conditions. In this situation,

potential borrowers are often left to the whims of the secondary market

in which institutional lenders half-way across the country don’t have the

capacity to be sensitive to local needs.
90

Ron Sher

There are many ways of doing complex redevelopment projects but the

confidence of the lenders is crucial. Bankers making eight or nine percent

are not going to take development risks or allow incremental or partial

financing to weaken their portfolios. Yet, in recent years, the secondary

lending market has introduced methods of segmenting parts of a single

project into loan packages called “tranches,” each of which has its own

level of risk and return. One package might be for the commercial space

construction, another for a certain grade of tenant, or another for different sectors of the property. Needless to say, these deals are complex, but

the net result is that developers can finance 80 percent or more of the

cost of a project without their own cash. In troubled projects, this level of

financing can make the difference between going ahead with a project or

letting it lay empty. On the other hand, my organization avoids loans that

will be sold into the secondary market because these kinds of loans

restrict our need to make changes to the property and to run the project

in a responsive and flexible manner. We’d rather pay a few extra percentage points to keep the attention of our primary lender rather than a

distant, institutional secondary lender. 

Perhaps central to convincing lenders to participate in a reuse

project in a distressed or underserved community is the role of public

money. The public sector has to guarantee some portion of the project to

guarantee lender confidence. With the complex relations that result from

big projects where the building, ownership, and tenanting arrangements

are always in flux, only a developer who understands the needs of the

lenders as well as the public sector can successfully structure a deal. 

Central to these complex interactions is the flow of information

and expertise. A quick survey of the redevelopment field reveals at least

one major problem: there are great disparities in the way people understand how the whole process works. Especially in places where shopping

centers are in trouble, very few people know the range of public and private market components that make projects possible. The roles and

responsibilities of a municipality, the banks, and the developer are not

always clear, and a project cannot depend on just one enlightened city
91

manager or builder. We need to make the system work more smoothly.

We need an organization that could transfer expertise to the city representatives, form connections with the retailers, and bring in the

architects, landscape architects, and urban planners. We need to circulate

case studies and take advantage of a huge knowledge base. Small cities can

not afford the full range of expertise that large, mixed-used projects

require, but if there was an organization to consult that could help educate their staffs on planning and development issues, cities could take a

more proactive stance and offer more of their own ideas in repositioning

older, distressed properties.

Donald R. Zuchelli

A thousand older shopping centers with a staggering 7 to 11 million

square feet of commercial space will be taken off the market in the next

10 years. Many other centers will see their profits fall below a 10 percent

rate of return, which would threaten any developer’s equity. Developers

are scared. Dead or declining malls can be retenanted, renovated with

new types of merchants or community uses, or demolished to make way

for entirely new uses. Ultimately, however, solutions to these failing

places will come from the cooperation of public agencies and institutional

lenders: the public-private partnership. 

The first problem in the older centers is the dilution of the equity

ownership since declining sales, failing leases, and empty stores make it

difficult to pay down the debt, much less refinance. In many cases, the 30

percent equity originally invested is wiped out. Also problematic but

rarely addressed is the hit taken by the small tenants in declining centers.

Many have barely paid off their furnishings and equipment and have yet

to make a profit, but in many cases the failing shopping center impels

them to try to get out of their leases anyway. 

The permanent lender has another set of problems. I represent

various officials trying to revitalize a Silver Spring, Maryland, redevelopment called City Place, a five-story, 440,000-square-foot retail project

that failed. The property is held by a good developer, but 87 percent of

his leases are about to run out and none are being resigned. At this point,
92

he is not paying down his mortgage. What happened next is very illuminating for studies of abandonment. Lazard Frères, the lender, simply put

the troubled loan—a “turkey without feathers”—into a much larger and

very attractive $500 million package and sold it to Starward, a secondary

lender. Through this repackaging, Lazard covered up the $60 million loss

of City Place by spreading it over other more successful projects. The

loss got lost, so to speak, inside a package containing five good loans and

three pretty good loans. Lazard later had to take back the problem mortgage, but in effect, they took back a $60 million credit for a future bundle

so neither they nor the secondary lender lost money. They can wait for

the troubled project to turn around and service its debt. Unfortunately,

the original developer and the tenants who could not pay off their frontend loans were wiped out. Nevertheless, this situation shows that the

bundling of financing and the leveraging of the bundle is crucial to freeing up buildings for repositioning.

City Place is also instructive for the ways in which public agencies

and monies can affect a project. Among the earliest department stores

built outside a major city, City Place presents some unique problems. The

public officials have agreed to finance the historic façade restoration and

to assist in the redesign of the street level to better accommodate new

retailing. The city has also undertaken a new parking plan for the center.

With these publicly backed elements in place, the redeveloper was willing

to buy the $60 million property for $20 million and begin the process of

recycling the building. 

In general, public policy varies greatly from place to place and it is

often difficult to know how elected officials, the general public, and the

developer will define their involvement in any project. In many cases, the

lender must mediate between public policy and the private developers’

need to maintain equity and reasonable returns. In addition, the general

public and many local officials often demand that developers rebuild

everything with cheap leases and a high payment for the land. Any developer would just walk away. Instead, there needs to be a cost-sharing

formula between the public and the private sectors, a kind of rational

“public capitalism” that resolves democracy and privatization. In such a
system, the lender, the mayor, city organizations, and the developer discuss, early in the project, the financial pluses and minuses, the

infrastructure needs, and the role of each party. This kind of organization

would give public policy a chance to really work. 

On the other hand, the developer has to respect public process and

citizen participation. There has to be stability in the political process and

citizen support for the elected officials. Citizen involvement in redevelopment projects improves both the design process and the eventual product.

In both cases, the positive environment helps elected officials make decisions. Ultimately, the developer has to convince the elected officials they

can get reelected. 

Also complicating most inner-ring suburban locations is the fact

that as much as 70 percent of public services like police, fire, education,

and parks are supported by nonresidential entities. The lost revenue from

declining shopping centers becomes a serious problem for local governments. They have no capital except when the occasional brave or

desperate mayor reaches into the city’s operating fund. When nonresidential revenues shrink a few percentage points in any community, especially

a distressed community, the tax increases that the residential population is

asked to bear can generate considerable political acrimony. In extreme

situations, some communities risk losing their autonomous, self-contained

status as they face the need for county or state subsidy for essential services. On the other hand, with good planning, municipalities can use debt or

bond financing, which pushes costs 20 to 25 years into the future. Public

entities support the bond over the long term by small measures like sales

taxes, user fees, and admission fees. From the municipal point of view,

this is how complex reuse projects should proceed, but developers often

fail to understand that public sector work requires long-term

commitments.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, the federal government also

offers mechanisms to move projects forward. Community Development

Block Grants (CDBG) make available zero-interest construction loans for

up to $60 or $70 million. These loans are U.S. Treasury backed and can

completely change the economics of preconstruction loans, leasing, and

93
94

placement fees. This can have a profound effect for abandonment and

reuse projects because it can also help smaller tenant leasing. The federal

grant can help start a revolving loan pool to assist tenants in furnishing

their raw shell with lights, fixtures, and equipment. So public intervention

can help the large- and small-scale aspects of reuse projects.

Benjamin R. Barber 

There are several problems with the way public-private partnerships typically work in complex redevelopment projects. In many cases, a developer

figures out how to deal with a big city bank and then goes to look for

local businesses and, at the last moment, goes to the public sector to

make the whole project viable through some kind of subsidy. The final

result of the negotiations seems to benefit the big financial players: they

make the decisions and take the profits, and the losses go to the public

and the little tenants. The risk is spread across the public’s back and the

private side takes all the profits. Risk is socialized and the taxpayer takes

the losses.

Most public-private deals have insufficient leveraging from the

public side. Electoral support is crucial, so reuse issues must become part

of the political landscape. Putting sprawl, development, and local business

issues into the political landscape may not win an election, but getting a

local mandate can strengthen elected officials in their negotiations in

redevelopment projects. With zoning, curb cuts, environmental regulations, and control of transportation, there could be substantial negotiating

strength. In many communities, the local vendors and businesses who are

hurt by dying malls cannot go to a secondary market or a big bank. But

these small businesses have many virtues: they are part of the community,

they will stick around (unlike the big chains), and they’re going to help

win a local election. A strong local business community can strengthen

public sector leveraging. If you get a group of local vendors ready to sign

leases for a reuse project, the banks will be happy. So it’s just as important

to work from the local side of the financial equation as from the big

lender side of the deal. 

We need to put together a consortium of developers, state 
95

planners, academics, architects, and urban planners that would be available to towns and assist in addressing failed malls. The financial and

planning knowledge of such a group would be invaluable in low-income

areas trying to revitalize a mall property and provide multiuse civic space.

Another method of assisting small and poorer communities derives

from the kinds of micro-financing used by the United Nations throughout the world. Such financing makes very small loans—as little as $50 in

some parts of the world—to start or enable local businesses. The costs of

the loans are high since the businesses are typically labor-intensive, but

percentages and rates of return are unusually high. In the United States,

micro-financing of $10,000 or $20,000 for small vendors could mean the

difference between starting a business or not. In addition, this kind of

loan could assist a small vendor in getting an equity share of the building,

in helping to develop the building, and in bringing a whole town around.

These kinds of loans are high risk, and traditional banks are skittish about

them, but they might dramatically improve the capacity of shopping center reuse projects to fill their spaces. 

In general, all the players need to make micro-changes. The

banks, the developers, and the vendors, as well as the public officials, 

have to make small adjustments to forge partnerships to make reuse and

redevelopment projects viable.
96

A stimulating new vision is called for:

one that can help rescue the failing

centers but also help them to be

genuine places in the older areas of

our spreading suburban environment.

We need to develop a deeper sense of

how to achieve these changes, and to

work toward guidelines for action.

This is the challenge...

—Mark Robbins
97

Organizations 

Bibliography 

Image Credits

Contributors 

Endnotes 
98

Organizations

National Endowment 

for the Arts

1100 Pennsylvania Avenue NW

Washington, DC 20506

(202) 682-5400

www.nea.gov

The National Endowment for the

Arts promotes design excellence in

the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, urban design/

planning, and historic preservation

through grants to communities 

and nonprofit organizations. 

Applications are accepted in four

categories: heritage and preservation, education and access, creation

and presentation, and planning and

stabilization. In addition to singlepurpose grants, the Endowment

offers special Leadership Initiatives

that forge active partnerships with

existing organizations to enhance

the quality of design in specific

areas.

The Mayors’ Institute 

on City Design

1620 I Street NW

Third Floor

Washington, DC 20006

(202) 463-1390

The Mayors’ Institute on City

Design, an award-winning program

sponsored by the National

Endowment for the Arts and

administered by the American

Architectural Foundation and the

United States Conference of

Mayors, is a forum that provides

mayors with the tools they need to

create more livable, beautiful, and

vital communities. At each meeting

of the Institute, a small number 

of mayors meet for two and 

one-half days with a select group 

of prominent professionals to 

discuss problems facing each city

and examine a broad range of 

ideas, precedents, and development

strategies.

Your Town

c/o Shelley S. Mastran

1785 Massachusetts Ave NW

Washington, DC 20036 

(202) 588-6000

Your Town assists rural communities facing a range of problems—

outmigration and loss of jobs, rapid

growth from suburbanization, an

influx of retirees—resulting in damage to a community’s vitality and

sense of place. Two and one-half

day workshops, sponsored by the

National Endowment for the Arts

and administered by the National

Trust for Historic Preservation and

the Faculty of Landscape

Architecture, SUNY Syracuse,

focus on the design process as a tool

to enhance community understanding of new conditions. Participants

include civic and business leaders,

local government officials, and

federal/state employees active in

rural development.

Neighborhood Reinvestment

Corporation

1325 G Street NW

Suite 800

Washington, DC 20005

(202) 376-2400

www.nw.org

The Neighborhood Reinvestment

Corporation (NRC)—created by

Congress in 1978 to revitalize

America’s older, distressed communities—supports a national network

of local nonprofit organizations.

The NRC creates and strengthens

resident-led partnerships of lenders,

business people, and local government officials to revitalize and

restore neighborhoods in decline.

Urban Land Institute

1025 Thomas Jefferson Street NW

Suite 500 West

Washington, DC 20007

www.uli.org

The Urban Land Institute (ULI) is

a nonprofit organization that

encourages high standards of land

use planning and development. The

Institute conducts research, interprets land use trends, disseminates

information, and sponsors a variety

of educational programs. The ULI

publishes a newsletter, Land Use

Digest, and the magazine Urban

Land, as well as numerous individual reports and books. 

Van Alen Institute

30 West 22 Street

New York, NY 10010

(212) 924-7000

www.vanalen.org 

The mission of Van Alen Institute 

is to improve the design of the

public realm. The Institute identifies critical issues that confront the

public realm, organizes tools and

public-private partnerships to

respond to these issues, and develops and communicates solutions

through its programs.

The Architectural League 

of New York

457 Madison Avenue

New York, NY 10022

www.archleague.org

For over 100 years the Architectural

League of New York has helped

architects, artists, and the public

enrich their understanding of the

importance of the art of architecture. The League focuses on the

aesthetic, cultural, and social concerns of architecture and the arts.

Through its exhibitions, competitions, publications, design studies,

and public programs, the League

has a national impact, while at the

same time playing a prominent role

in the civic life of New York City.
99

Bibliography

Egan, Nancy. “Retail Roundup.”

Urban Land, April 2000, 68–71,

114.

Fickes, Michael. “Youth is Restored

to Aging Missouri Center.”

Shopping Center World, September

1997, 40–44.

Gentry, Connie Robbins.

“Changing Tenant Mix Adds

Value.” Chain Store Age, March

2000, 191–192.

Grogan, Bradley C. “Reaching Out

to Redevelop.” Urban Land,

February 1999, 48.

International Council of Shopping

Centers. “NonTraditional/

NonRetail in Shopping Centers,” 

a list assembled by the Public

Relations Department of the

International Council of Shopping

Centers, New York.

Kondrot, Keith. “Time for a

Remodel?” Shopping Center World,

August 1998, 58–60.

McCaffery, Dan. “From Mall to

Main Street.” Urban Land, October

1998, 22.

McCloud, John. “Coming Full

Circle.” Shopping Center World,

December 1999, 42–56.

Phillips, Patrick L. “Remaking the

Shopping Center.” In ULI on the

Future—Reinventing Real Estate,

18–25. Washington, D.C.: ULI—

the Urban Land Institute, 1995. 

“Putting ‘Village’ Back into a

Regional Shopping Center.” Urban

Land, July 1997, 74–75.

“Public/Private Partnership Revives

Urban Shopping Center.” Urban

Land, September 1997, 96–97.

Sher, Ron and Merrit Sher.

“Developing and Investing in Local

and Community Centers and

Highway Retail.” In John White

and Kevin Gray, eds., Shopping

Centers and Other Retail Properties.

New York: John Wiley and Sons,

1996.

Urban Land Institute. Developing

Urban Entertainment Centers.

Washington, D.C.: ULI—the

Urban Land Institute, 1998.

Urban Land Institute. Shopping

Center Renovation and Expansion:

Selected References. Washington,

D.C.: Urban Land Institute,

Infopacket no. 371, revised, 2000.

Vasquez, Beverly. “Denver’s Mature

Retail Market Evolves.” Urban

Land, April 1998, 71–75.

Image Credits

Cover: Courtesy of Margaret

Crawford.

5–6: Courtesy of Mark Robbins.

12: Courtesy of David Smiley.

21, 25, 27, 29: Courtesy of

Margaret Crawford.

43: Courtesy of Kevin Mattson.

44 (top): From Peter Katz, ed., 

The New Urbanism: Towards an

Architecture of Community (NY:

McGraw Hill, 1994), 168.

44 (bottom): Courtesy of Kevin

Mattson.

48: Courtesy of Mark Robbins.

51, 52: Courtesy of Mark Falcone,

Continuum Partners.

53–55: Courtesy of Marilou W.

Smith, City of Kettering.

58–61: Courtesy of Michael

Rotondi, RoTo Architects.

62–67: Courtesy of Hargreaves

Associates.

68–71: Courtesy of Gary Edward

Handel + Associates. Metreon 

photos on pp. 70, 71 by Timothy

Hursley.

72–73: Courtesy of Darren

Petrucci, A-I-R Inc.

74–75: Courtesy of

Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis.

76–77: Courtesy of SHoP:

Christopher R. Sharples, William

W. Sharples, Coren D. Sharples,

Kimberly J. Holden, Gregg A.

Pasquarelli.
100

Contributors

Andrew Aidt has been the Long

Range Planner for the City of

Kettering, Ohio, since 1992. He is

involved with professional organizations including the American

Planning Association, the

International City/County

Management Association, and the

Urban and Regional Information

Systems Association. Aidt has presented his work at numerous

planning-related forums including

the 1999 National Planning

Conference in Seattle. 

Glenn Allen, ASLA, is a Founding

Principal of Hargreaves Associates.

This internationally renowned

consulting firm of landscape architects and planners has offices in San

Francisco, California, and

Cambridge, Massachusetts, and

particular expertise in reviving

abandoned sites in a variety of locations. Allen is the Managing

Principal of the Cambridge office.

He was the on-site Project

Landscape Architect for the

Olympics 2000 in Sydney, Australia,

and has served as Principal-inCharge for such award-winning

projects as the Louisville

Waterfront Park, Parque do Tejo e

Trancão in Portugal, and

Candlestick Park in San Francisco. 

Benjamin R. Barber is the Walt

Whitman Professor of Political

Science at Rutgers University and

the Director of the Walt Whitman

Center for the Culture and Politics

of Democracy, Rutgers University.

The Whitman Center has recently

cosponsored the formation of the

Agora Coalition to create model

designs, foster creative cooperation,

and broker public-private partnerships around the establishing of

“mall-town squares” in commercial

spaces. Barber also holds the Kekst

Professorship of Civil Society at the

University of Maryland and is the

author of fifteen books including

Strong Democracy (1984) and Jihad

vs. McWorld (1995). His latest book

is The Truth of Power: Intellectual

Affairs in the Clinton White House

(2001).

Margaret Crawford is Professor of

Urban Design and Planning

Theory at the Graduate School of

Design at Harvard University. Her

research focuses on the evolution,

uses, and meanings of urban space.

Her book Building the Workingman’s

Paradise: The Design of American

Company Towns (1995) examines the

rise and fall of professionally

designed industrial environments.

She edited The Car and the City: The

Automobile, the Built Environment,

and Daily Urban Life and Everyday

Urbanism (1992) and has published

numerous articles on shopping

malls, public space, and other issues

in the American built environment. 

Mark Falcone is Managing

Director of Continuum Partners,

LLC. He previously served as

Director of Operations and the

Retail Business Unit at Pioneer

Development Company in

Syracuse, New York, and as chair of

the Onondaga County Commission

on Economic Development. He

currently sits on The Nature

Conservancy’s National

Development Council and

Colorado State Board and cochairs

that chapter’s Heart of the West

Capital Campaign.

Robert Fishman is Professor of

Architecture and Urban Planning 

at the Taubman College of

Architecture and Urban Planning 

of the University of Michigan, 

Ann Arbor. He is the editor of 

The American Planning Tradition:

Culture and Policy (2000) and was a

Public Policy Fellow at the Wilson

Center in 1999. He is the author 

of Bourgeois Utopias: The Rise and

Fall of Suburbia (1987) and many

articles about urban history, urban

design, and planning.
101

Will Fleissig is a Principal at

Continuum Partners, LLC and an

architect and urban designer. He 

is responsible for coordinating all

planning, design, and entitlement

activities at Continuum. He has

been involved in developing 

mixed-income housing and has

participated in a number of academic and research efforts focused

on limiting urban sprawl. He has

taught at Harvard University’s

Graduate School of Design and 

has worked with the Congress 

for New Urbanism, the federal

Environmental Protection Agency,

and Colorado University’s Estate

Center in Boulder.

Rosalie Genevro is Executive

Director of the Architectural

League of New York, an arts 

organization dedicated to the presentation of important work and

ideas in contemporary architecture,

urbanism, and design. Major projects during her tenure have

included a series of design studies

that address important public building issues in New York City, such as

“Vacant Lots” (1988), “New

Schools for New York” (1990),

“The Productive Park” (1992),

“Envisioning East New York”

(1995), and “Housing for a New

Century: Proposals for Arverne”

(2001). Major traveling exhibitions

she has organized have included

Hugh Ferriss: Metropolis (1986), The

Experimental Tradition: Twenty-Five

Years of American Architecture

Competitions (1986), Renzo Piano

Building Workshop: Selected Projects

(1992), and Ten Shades of Green

(2000), a presentation of buildings

that combine environmental sensitivity with design quality. 

Gary Handel, AIA, founded Gary

Edward Handel + Associates in

1994. The firm has become a leader

in the design of complex, mixed-use

urban projects and has won numerous awards including a Progressive

Architecture Design Award, an

American Institute of Architecture

Project Award, an Architectural

League Critics Selection, and the

Project of the Year award from the

National Commercial Builders

Council. Prior to founding his own

firm, Handel was a Senior Associate

Partner at Kohn Pedersen Fox

Associates, P.C., where he was

responsible for more than 23 major

projects in the United States and

abroad. 

William Ivey became the seventh

Chairman of the National

Endowment for the Arts in May

1998. During his tenure, the

Endowment developed such innovative programs as Challenge

America, Creative Links: Positive

Alternatives for Youth, and

ArtsREACH, and expanded its

partnerships with other federal

agencies, particularly the

Department of Education. A folklorist, musician, teacher, and writer,

Ivey was Director of the Country

Music Foundation in Nashville,

Tennessee, and Chairman of the

National Academy of Recording

Arts & Sciences before joining the

Endowment.

Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis is a New

York–based architecture and

research partnership comprised of

Marc Tsurumaki and twin brothers

Paul and David Lewis.

Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis recently

participated in the year 2000

National Design Triennial at the

Cooper-Hewitt Museum, and the

firm was selected by Architectural

Record (December 2000) as one of

10 young firms from around the

world that constitute a new vanguard in architecture.

Kevin Mattson is Faculty Associate

at the Contemporary History

Institute and Associate Professor 

of American History at Ohio

University in Athens, Ohio.

Previously he was Associate

Director of the Walt Whitman

Center for the Culture and Politics

of Democracy, Rutgers University.

Author of Creating a Democratic

Public: The Struggle for Urban

Participatory Democracy during the

Progressive Era (1998) and a forthcoming book on intellectuals who

shaped the New Left, he has also

written for a wide variety of popular

and academic publications.
102

Contributors (continued)

Richard B. Peiser is the Michael D.

Spear Professor of Real Estate

Development at Harvard

University. He has blended his

academic career with professional

real estate experience, developing

homes, apartments, and land in

Texas and California, as well as

consulting with real estate and

governmental organizations. His

publications cover a range of real

estate and urban development issues

including urban sprawl, new towns,

real estate finance and deal structuring, land use economics, and urban

land use regulation. He is the

author of Professional Real Estate

Development: The ULI Guide to the

Business (1992) and is a Senior

Fellow and Trustee of the Urban

Land Institute. 

Darren Petrucci is an Assistant

Professor of Architecture at 

Arizona State University. He is the

founder and principal of A-I-R

(Architecture-InfrastructureResearch) Inc., a research and

design office that focuses on the

interactions and processes that

shape the contemporary American

urban and suburban landscapes.

Joseph F. Reilly has been with the

J. P. Morgan Chase Community

Development Corporation (CDC)

since 1989. He manages a staff of

40 professionals within the CDC’s

Real Estate Lending Group, which

provides financing for affordable

housing and other community

development projects throughout

the northeastern United States.

Prior to joining Chase, Reilly held

several positions with the New York

City Department of Housing,

Preservation and Development

(HPD). He currently serves on 

the boards of the Low Income

Housing Fund, The Community

Development Trust, and the

Enterprise Social Investment

Corporation.

Mark Robbins is the Director of

Design at the National Endowment

for the Arts where he has undertaken an aggressive program to

strengthen the presence of design in

the public realm. In addition to

efforts to expand grant opportunities he has instituted new

Leadership Initiatives including

New Public Works, which supports

national design competitions.

Collectively, these activities have

doubled the available funding for

design programs. Robbins is an

architect and an artist and maintains

a practice that encompasses installations, curatorial projects, and

teaching. He was formerly an

Associate Professor in the

Knowlton School of Architecture at

The Ohio State University and

Curator of Architecture at Ohio

State’s Wexner Center for the Arts.

Michael Rotondi, an architect and

educator, is a Principal in RoTo

Architects, founded in 1991, and a

member of the faculty and Board of

Directors at Southern California

Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Rotondi was one of the founders of

this internationally recognized

architectural school in 1972 and has

taught there since 1976. He was the

corecipient of the American

Academy and Institute of Arts and

Letters Awards in Architecture in

1992, and he was selected to the

American Institute of Architects

College of Fellows in 1997. Since

1999, he has also taught at Arizona

State University. 

Ron Sher is the Managing Partner

of Terranomics Development, a 

real estate firm specializing in 

the redevelopment of retail properties, among them the Crossroads 

shopping center in Bellevue,

Washington. He recently created

the Third Place Company of which

he is the Chief Executive Officer.

The company, owner of Elliott Bay

Books and Third Place Books, is

devoted to creating retail places

that foster community and improve

the neighborhoods in which they

operate. 
103

SHoP/Sharples Holden

Pasquarelli is a design firm with

five partners whose education and

experience encompass architecture,

fine arts, structural engineering, and

finance and business management.

Founded in 1996, SHoP specializes

in applying new digital technologies

to the design, as well as the production and construction, of

architectural and urban work. The

firm’s recent projects include a

university academic building, a civic

park, two public art installations, a

museum, retail shops, and two midrise apartment buildings. SHoP was

recently awarded the 2001

Emerging Voices Award by the

Architectural League of New York

and the 2001 Academy Award in

Architecture from the American

Academy of Arts and Letters.

David Smiley is an architect and 

an architectural and urban historian

who teaches American urban and

suburban history at Columbia

University. He has published essays

on urban history, sprawl, and suburbanization, as well as architectural

criticism. His architectural work

includes commercial and residential

projects and campus planning in

Jerusalem, Israel, and Washington

D.C. He has also participated in

urban design and planning projects

in New York City as a Partner with

the firm Design + Urbanism. 

Marilou W. Smith, has been

Mayor of the City of Kettering,

Ohio, since January 1998. Smith

was elected to the Kettering City

Council in 1989 and served two

terms including two years as Vice

Mayor. A retired business professional, she is a member of

numerous civic organizations

including the United States

Conference of Mayors, National

League of Cities, Ohio Municipal

League, and the Montgomery &

Greene County Mayors &

Managers Association, of which she

is Vice President.

Marilyn Jordan Taylor, AIA, is

Partner and Chairman with

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP.

She first joined the firm in 1971

and moved to New York City in

1985 to lead an expanded Urban

Design and Planning practice within SOM. She has also been active in

airport and transportation projects,

culminating in the founding of

SOM Airports. She has been

involved in extensive institutional,

commercial, and residential work

throughout New York City, and in

additional projects as varied and farflung as Providence Capital Center

in Rhode Island, Celebration New

Town in Florida, the New Jersey

Center for the Performing Arts,

Yongtai New Town in China,

Canary Wharf in London,

EuroDisney in France, and Sentul

Raya in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Martin Zogran teaches in the

Department of Urban Planning and

Design at the Graduate School of

Design at Harvard University and

has his own architecture practice in

New York City. He has worked for

Rafael Vinoly Architects as a

Project Architect for the Tokyo

International Forum and for

Margaret Helfand Architects as a

Project Manager for the

Swarthmore College campus expansion plan. His work has been

published in Domus, Interior Design,

and Places magazines.

Donald R. Zuchelli is the President

and Chief Executive Officer of

ZHA, Inc. in Annapolis, Maryland.

This firm serves as the owner representative organization for an

extensive array of retail space, office

space, hotels, and residential units.

He has 40 years of experience in

economic development, strategic

planning, and corporate management. He has been involved with

projects including the development

of a “town center” in Fairfax,

Virginia; the location of the new

Cincinnati Bengals’ and Reds’ stadiums; and the negotiation of the

Mall of America project land lease.

He is currently involved in the

Urban Land Institute’s (ULI)

Leadership Council and the

Executive Urban Entertainment

Council.
104

Endnotes

Civic Space, Benjamin R. Barber

1 This essay is excerpted from

“Malled, Mauled, and

Overhauled: Arresting Suburban

Sprawl by Transforming

Suburban Malls into Usable Civic

Space,” in Marcel Hénaff and

Tracy B. Strong, eds., Public Space

and Democracy (University of

Minnesota Press, 2001), 201–220.

2 Tom Peters in his Brand You

(New York: Knopf, 1999), cited in

Paul Starr, “Strategic

Narcissism,” American Prospect

(March–April, 1998): 96.

3 Many developers have agreements

with municipal transportation

systems not to permit stops near

their malls. Trumbling Shopping

Park, in Connecticut, fought a

three-year battle with the Greater

Bridgeport Transit District to

stop buses from discharging passengers near the mall on Friday

and Saturday nights and in 1996

was supported by an arbitrator

who ruled the mall had the right

to limit service! In Buffalo, in

1995, a black teenager was killed

crossing a highway to get to a

mall in a suburb that barred

inner-city buses from entering its

property (though buses from

upscale suburbs were allowed in!).

See Jane Fritch, “Hanging Out

with the Mall,” New York Times,

November 25, 1997.

4 Robert Reich describes this strategy of secession by which

middle-class Americans try to

escape the trials and burdens of

the city by seceding into gated

suburbs in which they buy private

services with the monies withheld

from public expenditure as part of

a (public) tax reduction policy,

thereby starving the public sector

of needed support and worsening

the conditions that justify secession to begin with; see his Work of

Nations (New York: Knopf, 1991).

5 There are a few welcome exceptions. At the Stamford Town

Center, mall managers hired

youth social workers both to

control teenagers and help make

them feel welcome. See Fritch,

“Hanging Out with the Mall.”

6 This can make sense in certain

parts of the country like New

England, where a strong tradition

of small town self-governance

persists, and where hostility to

suburbanization has strong roots.

But in New Jersey or Ohio or

central California, it looks merely

nostalgic or, worse, indulgently

elitist. 

Antidotes to Sprawl, Kevin Mattson

1 Victor Gruen, “Introverted

Architecture,” Progressive

Architecture 38 (1957): 204–8. See

also Lizabeth Cohen, “From

Town Center to Shopping

Center: The Reconfiguration of

Community Marketplaces in

Postwar America,” American

Historical Review 101 (1996):

1068–71. On suburbanization, see

Robert Fishman, Bourgeois Utopias

(New York: Basic Books, 1987)

and Kenneth Jackson, Crabgrass

Frontier: The Suburbanization of

the United States (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1985).

2 Quoted in David Finkel, “Mall is

Beautiful,” Washington Post

Magazine, December 10, 1995.

Ironically, this mall was never

built due to lack of community

support.

3 Quoted in Ariel Sabar,

“Providence Place: Will it

Become the New ‘Town Square,’”

Providence Sunday Journal, July 25,

1999, A-1.

4 For reviews of the legal history

and the issues debated, see

Cohen, “From Town Center to

Shopping Center”; Witold

Rybczynski, City Life (New York:

Scribner’s, 1995), 209; William S.

Kowinski, The Malling of America:

An Inside Look at the Great

Consumer Paradise (New York:

Morrow, 1985), 354–9; “Now,

Public Rights in Private

Domains,” New York Times,

December 25, 1994; Heidi Gralla,

“Public Access, Private Property:

The Law, The Policies, The

Debate,” Shopping Centers Today,

November 1991.

5 Nelson BOCK and Patricia

Lawless-Avelar, Petitioners, v.

WESTMINSTER MALL COMPANY, No. 90SC433, Supreme

Court of Colorado, En. Banc.

October 7, 1991. Rehearing

denied Nov. 4, 1991. 

6 Quoted in “Megamall Must Allow

Protests,” Star-Tribune

(Minneapolis), July 25, 1997, 1A.

7 Maureen Bausch, “Mall of

America Will Keep Barring

Protests and Disorderly

Behavior,” Star-Tribune

(Minneapolis, Minnesota), August

5, 1997, 12A. 

8 See Juliet Schor, The Overworked

American (New York: Basic Books,

1991).

9 Heidi Elliott, “Internet Still Not

Home Shopping Mall,” Electronic

News, April 13, 1998; Susan

Kuchinskas, “The E-Commerce

Cometh,” Brandweek, September

21, 1998; Danine Alati,

“Retailing,” Contract Design,

January 1999, 57; Kim Komando,

“On-Line Shopping,” Popular

Mechanics, November 1998, 40–3.
105

10 Edmund Mander, “Spate of Retail

Bankruptcies Worries Industry,”

Shopping Centers Today, June 1999,

1. Steven Bergsman, “The

Ground Floor: Slow Times at

Sherman Oaks—What’s Ailing

the Malls of America?” Barron’s,

May 17, 1999, 40.

11 Alati, “Retailing,” 51.

12 Bergsman, “The Ground Floor,”

39.

13 George Homsy, “New Lives for

Old Malls,” Planning, May 1999,

20.

14 Sharon King, “Shoppers Get

Awards,” New York Times,

December 28, 1998, C1.

15 John Melaniphy, Melaniphy and

Associates, “Possible Solutions to

Mall and Shopping Center

Vacancies,” photocopy in author’s

possession.

16 Leslie Kaufman, “Sony Builds a

Mall, But Don’t Call It That,”

New York Times, July 25, 1999,

Section 3, 1.

17 See “NonTraditional/NonRetail

in Shopping Centers,” a list

assembled by the Public Relations

Department of the International

Council of Shopping Centers

(New York).

18 “Even City Hall Has Moved to

the Mall,” New York Times, July

30, 1995.

19 On first-ring suburbs, see Rip

Rapson and William Morrish,

“First-Ring Suburbs: The Next

Generation of Community Policy

and Design (University of

Minnesota, Working Paper of the

Design Center for American

Urban Landscape); Herbert

Muschamp, “Becoming Unstuck

on the Suburbs,” New York Times,

Week in Review, October 19,

1997, 4.

20 “Crossroads Shopping Center: A

Turnaround Case Study” (available from Terranomics), 20. See

also Neal Peirce, “This Shopping

Center Values Community as

Much as Commerce,” News and

Observer (Charlotte, North

Carolina), March 17, 1996, 22A;

articles from the Seattle PostIntelligencer at http://seattlep-i.

nwsource.com/neighbors/crossroads/;

and Ron Sher and Merrit Sher,

“Developing and Investing in

Local and Community Centers

and Highway Retail,” in Shopping

Centers and Other Retail Properties,

ed. John White and Kevin Gray

(New York: John Wiley and Sons,

1996).

21 See Peter Katz, The New

Urbanism: Toward an Architecture

of Community (New York:

McGraw Hill, 1994), 168–77;

“Fifteen Ways to Fix the

Suburbs,” Newsweek, May 15,

1995. 

22 “Failed Shopping Plaza Becomes

a Town Center,” New York Times,

Real Estate section, December

20, 1998, 9.

23 Personal interviews with Mark

Remsa and Bice Wilson; see also

conference proceedings, Walt

Whitman Center for the Culture

and Politics of Democracy

(Rutgers University) and the

Institute for Civil Society, held in

Red Bank, New Jersey, November

20–21, 1999.

24 Eli Lehrer, “Mixed-Use Malls

Come of Age,” Insight on the

News, June 14, 1999, 23. 25 For more in-depth statements on

these points, see Ray Oldenburg,

The Great Good Place (New York:

Marlowe, 1989) and the introduction to my own article,

“Remaking Public Space,”

National Civic Review 88 (1999).

Two Malls, Kettering, Ohio, Mayor

Marilou W. Smith and Andrew Aidt

1 According to correspondence

from Andrew Aidt, December 31,

2001, Hills and Dales has been

almost completely redeveloped,

with two office buildings and

public spaces completed, including a park in the median of the

road and wide sidewalks with

extensive landscaping. Kettering

is in serious negotiations with a

national restaurant chain and an

office/retail developer for the

remaining two sites. —Ed.
106
107
108

PRINCETON ARCHITECTURAL PRESS

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David J. Smiley editor National Endowment for the Arts SPRAWL AND PUBLIC SPACE: REDRESSING THE MALL