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Reports: Sprawl retrofit

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How to mitigate the impact of big box stores
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New Urban News Article with images, 7/1/2008
Belmar, an urban center in Colorado, offers cutting-edge ideas for incorporating large retailers into a mixed-use environment.
There are many ways to integrate large-format retail stores into a pedestrian-oriented environment. The choice depends on the budget and the unique circumstances of each main street or urban center. Belmar, a new urbanist grayfield development in Lakewood, Colorado, employs four strategies. A downtown that is being built on the site of a former regional mall, Belmar incorporates a Dick’s Sporting Goods of 80,000 square feet, a 65,000 sq. ft. Whole Foods, and a 64,000 sq. ft., 16-screen, multiplex theater. Belmar also includes a series of “mid-box” retailers like DSW, Pier 1, Linens ’n Things, and Party America. These large retail/entertainment uses fit into a downtown that will eventually have 1,400 residential units, offices, civic uses, a hotel, and scores of small shops and eateries.

Conversion of malls to mixed-use centers gathers speed
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New Urban News Article with images, 3/1/2008
Pennsylvania REIT is creating a town center at a New Jersey mall and forming a similar strategy in Orlando, Florida.
Last year General Growth Properties announced that it will gradually redevelop many of its shopping malls into mixed-use centers. Now the Pennsylvania Real Estate Investment Trust (PREIT), which operates 38 malls in the eastern half of the US, is embarking on much the same strategy, starting with its floundering 1,127,000 sq. ft. Echelon Mall in Voorhees Township, New Jersey.

A suburban agglomeration becomes a downtown
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New Urban News Article with images and sidebar, 12/1/2004
Kendall offers a glimpse of how an “edge city” can evolve with the help of a plan and a form-based code.
The roughly half-square-mile heart of Kendall in Dade County, Florida, is imprinted so deeply with conventional suburban development that it is difficult to imagine it changing in character. At the very center of Kendall is the 1.4 million sq. ft. Dadeland Mall, surrounded by parking, on a 70-acre parcel. To the north of the mall are low-rise apartment complexes, to the south are various commercial buildings — all auto-oriented, with no coherent urban design. The entire site is bisected by a functional drainage waterway called Snapper Creek and is bounded on the east by a mega-arterial, US Route 1.

Taking the ‘sub’ out of suburb
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New Urban News Article with images, 1/1/09
A new book finds the pace of suburban retrofits accelerating, leading to polycentric metro areas.
The time for taking modest steps to alter little pieces of the suburbs is over, say Ellen Dunham-Jones and June Williamson. The rate of redevelopment has sped up in the past several years, but if the promise of suburban transformation is to be realized, we’re going to need larger-scale projects — preferably increments of 40 acres or more, according to Dunham-Jones, of Georgia Tech’s architecture program, and Williamson, an architect and urban designer who teaches at City College of New York.

The retrofit of suburbia: The residential pod
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New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Of all the ways of developing land that prevail today in America, the housing pod is probably the most pervasive. The unintended consequence of a post-World War II policy of mass housing production on “efficient” cleared sites is this: the American Dream of owning a single-family detached house has become enveloped by a system that produces technically, financially, socially, and physically isolating monocultures.

The retrofit of suburbia: The shopping mall
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New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell
Real estate development’s most tediously repeated truism is that the three most important factors in property value are location, location, and location. That observation has now been stretched into a self-fulfilling prophecy. American retailing, in particular, has been subject to the mindless protocol of “locations” made by the intersection of traffic counts, producing at those points the massively repetitious shopping centers and malls of American suburbia.

The retrofit of suburbia: The suburban house
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New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Not only have space expectations risen, the image of what is desirable has evolved. A half century of change now leaves a substantial portion of the postwar housing stock feeling cramped and looking spartan.

The retrofit of suburbia: The office park
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New Urban News Technical Page by Andres Duany, Michael Morrissey, and Patrick Pinnell

Suburbia was conceived in the desire for blandly pleasant places. It sometimes achieved this, particularly where maturing landscape obscured infantile architecture. But visual satisfaction upon arrival at fullness now often obscures an underlying irony; suburbia has begun losing value, both because of technical obsolescence and generational uncoolness. To use a term intrinsic to our consumption-based society, the first generation of post-war suburbia (1945-1968) is “outtadate,” and elements of the second (1969-1989) are getting there.