My town used to have its own regional mall. It first opened its doors when I was around six. In fact, one of my earliest memories is of resenting being left at home with a babysitter when my parents were invited to attended the opening night gala because my father was one of the urban planners who had worked with the town through the development approval phases of the project.
Dad was still working with the town decades later when another developer came in to tear down the dead retail hulk that the mall had become and replace it with shiny new Target, Costco, Work Out World and other associated retail uses. Our mall had died slowly over the course of several years due to a variety of things including mismanagement and the failure to find and keep a third anchor as one department store after another filed for bankruptcy, but mainly what killed it was the decline in mall usage in general. Our mall was not the only one in our region to die.
Many of these malls are being be torn down and replaced with a newer retail model, something I call the drive-only village, with a cluster of large box stores placed so far apart that you have to get in your car to go from one to the next. Many others are being given superficial face lifts and interior renovations in the hopes of breathing new life into them. However, as Mother Nature Network points out, these building also present an opportunity for adaptation to newer, perhaps greener, uses:
Well, if a mall hasn’t already closed, it can consider one of the new iterations of the contemporary mall. Communities and city planners have gotten creative, using abandoned mall spaces for schools, government offices, medical clinics, casinos, wedding venues, call centers and churches. And while some malls are being torn down and housing or completely new retail buildings are being built, it is much more economically savvy and green to reuse the existing infrastructures.
via A green revolution at our nations malls | MNN – Mother Nature Network.
One of my recent clients did something like this. He found a dead strip mall which has withered from a vibrant retail center to a mostly empty hulk housing only two small restaurants, a dry cleaners, and the occasional short-term furniture liquidator tenant. He cleaned the whole place up, reworking the parking fields, refacing the entire building, and then rather than finding a bunch of chain stores to lease his space to, he creating a new business to occupy the bulk of it–an indoor amusement center and entertainment/banquet venue. He took this huge indoor space and made it home to carnival rides, laser tag, a go-cart speedway, several restaurants, and a classic seaside arcade. What was once an homage to consumerism is now a place where families can spend an afternoon or evening actively playing together and having fun.
While this is not necessarily a “green” use, the clever reuse of the existing building shows that there is truly hope that all these huge buildings littering our communities can be successfully adapted to non-retail uses. I would love to see the indoor park idea brought to life–in fact I suspect that doing so in a mall on life-support might even boost its viability. If the mall had comfortable and landscaped indoor running paths for me to use, they would be luring me in several times a week rather than several times a year! And who’s to say that I wouldn’t wind up stopping by the Starbucks for a post-run drink or check out the newest in running shoes while I was there?
