How do you revitalize the American shopping mall?

This is an interesting article on the travails of malls.  Like John Tierney over at Instapundit, I was struck by this passage:

Is it possible to breathe life into dead malls? “Sometimes a mall goes out of business because it has lost its economic reason for being,” architect Victor Dover notes, but “almost every community needs something.” We need to “stop thinking about these as failed shopping center properties and start thinking about them as potential mixed-use properties.” Reinventing shopping malls won’t be easy. They are large and inflexible spaces. Yet, as Victor Gruen knew, we have always needed gathering places. That is why we should look back to Gruen’s original vision of the mall to find its purpose for the decades ahead.

Many of these shopping centers are ideal sites for transit-oriented, mixed-use developments that include housing, retail, office, services, and public space.

…the major mall in my area is probably the Mall In Columbia, which has pretty much backed into this model: as near as I can tell the mall came first, and then they built around it fairly comprehensively. It’s certainly surrounded by both office and housing (medium to upscale), to the point where it’s easily within walking distance of both. The mall also recently incorporated a new outdoor wing of restaurants and shops; as far as I can tell, the place is thriving. How much of that is fallout from the fact that Columbia, Maryland is one of the most successful planned cities in America? …Good question.  But, yeah, you can benefit from an aggressive mixed-use zoning strategy, I think.

[pause]

I’m sorry. This is probably awfully dull for most people. Civic planning is one of those rare things that is more sexy than it sounds, in my admittedly odd opinion.

15 thoughts on “How do you revitalize the American shopping mall?”

    1. Not necessarily.
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      Shopping at a mall is a time and travel commitment that shopping from your cubicle via Amazon .. doesn’t take.
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      Just fixing the economy won’t give people their time back, or .. more accurately .. won’t persuade some of us that it’s a good *use* of our restored time.
      .
      Mew

      1. Thats basically how I am. Unless I need it right away then I can wait 2 business days for Amazon to ship it.

        1. Yep, and with Prime, I get to deal with Amazon, not some over-caffeinated, underpaid store clerk…
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          Oh, and I can throw a couple pennies in Moe’s tip jar at the same time.
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          Win-win.
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          Mew

  2. I’m just thankful to have a video game store and a bookstore available when my wife wants to look at clothes.

  3. This actually is a very interesting topic. Myself, I often call on customers in malls, so I see plenty of rundown ones. Mixed used is definitely the way to go (if you’ve never read Jane Jacobs ‘the death and life of great american cities,’ I highly recommend it) for a variety of reasons (the shortest version is that a mix of uses gives people multiple reasons to be there).

    Myself, I think they should go even further. Don’t just build housing and offices nearby. Build them in the mall. Picture if you had the usual 1-2 levels of stores, and then a floor of offices facing the promenade above that. Then, at an intersection, build up a few more stories with condos or apartments. All facing inward, so that the front of their units are facing a perennially pleasant climate with natural light and something green.

    1. Years ago after reading about all of the proposed “cities of the future” in science fiction I had concluded that the drawings always looked like you were living in a shopping mall.

        1. I actually had to look up that word, but yes. I also recall that Conan the Barbarian ran across one or two such places (one in “Red Nails” IIRC) and that never worked out very well.

  4. http://deadmalls.com/
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    Lots of data about where to find dead malls, and some data on ways they’ve been re-purposed .. for those who do want to dig deeper.
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    If I had the bucks, I think I’d look for a nicely located dead big-box and see if it could be converted to a farmers market kind of deal..
    .
    Mew

      1. Most welcome. I discovered it when I was seriously considering taking up “urban spelunking” as a hobby. (an idea since abandoned as dangerous, impractical, and possibly violating cat’s policy of avoiding police entanglements…)
        .
        Mew

  5. It’s not far from the subject of roads and expressways, and I can remember being fascinated with those even as a little kid. I always wanted to see the road atlas to figure out where we were going.

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