I was just reading about neo-traditional developments and had one of my somewhat strange but maybe funny ideas. I call it Reservercial Development. Picture a typical mall but in addition to lower rent stores off the main concourse, you have town houses and maybe apartments! A teenagers heaven. Add a grocery store and its complete.
Some architects, developers, designers, academics, and planners are beginning to understand that malls are becoming an outmoded form of shopping. Many malls now have spaces occupied by post offices, business offices, and other uses not typically associated with "shopping." This is a creative solution to fill up vacant space. The press carries many stories on a regular basis about old malls being demolished, redeveloped, and re-thought. Calthorpe is in California and has been involved on many of these redesigns and my understanding that his plans are of either two modes: 1) demolish the mall and redevelop it as a mixed-use urban center (a la New Urbanism), or 2) retrofit it to accomodate more stuctures, that is, redevelop the unused portions of the vast sea of parking lots to more usable form. Your notion of adding residential units inside the mall does not sound that far-fechted. Good idea!
(You should see Calthorpe's redesign of the old Denver airport - hundreds or acres to be redeveloped into thousands of homes!)
Yeah... Beaner's right, Calthorpe is really into this type of thing. He did a concept plan for Portland's Gateway Mall area (on the eastside of I-205)...
http://www.calthorpe.com/Project%20S...y/Gateway.html
It wonder if anything will ever come of it though...
Thanks nerudite. Here are the existing conditions at that Portland site:
... and here is the concept plan:
You can clearly see that the mall is completely gone!
But speaking of outmoded forms of shopping, perhaps a neo-trad or NU solution might be outmoded as well. With the car ever-present in our society, maybe compact, dense areas won't work either. I'm not neccessarily against neo-trad plans and places, but if we're considering outmoded urban forms, maybe this should be considered as well. Andres Duany has suggested that maybe New Urbanism should be renamed Post-Suburban Planning. WIth that new moniker, he may be onto something!
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