The retrofit of suburbia: The shopping mall

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.

While the retail system is large and ubiquitous, size and pervasiveness are no guarantees of permanence. Direct factors such as evolving transportation patterns, and indirect ones such as fashion, are combining to render imminently obsolete a large portion of the auto-oriented retail space built since the 1970s. It is time to plan, not for carting the old malls to the landfill, but for recycling them as town centers seamlessly connected to the residential areas surround-
ing them.