The Death And the Revival of the Shopping Mall

Along with suburban homes being sold, other suburban creations such as the shopping mall will undergo a period of pseudo-metropolis sickness until abandonment or have to vie for survival. In rough economic times, with shopping centers and strip malls having a vacancy rate of "11 percent in the last quarter of 2011" according to a New York Times editorial, suburbs are experiencing the death of malls and big box stores, but abandoned malls have given way to innovative urban transformations (Clifford). A Cleveland mall, Galleria at Erieview, recently had begun to close on weekends and now has only eight retail stores and fewer smaller stores. In an attempt to make use of the suffering mall, a section of it covered with a glass-roof has been transformed into a vegetable garden, a smart move to promote local agriculture and community. And with that, there will be less consumption if more shopping malls go down this path. Retailers are beginning to notice that malls are overbuilt, and city commissioners do not have the funding to shut down malls, so they retrofit them. Urban planners have taken this opportunity to creatively “spruce up and rethink the uses of many artifacts” and replace stores with schools, clinics, churches, and offices. Galleria at Erieview has rented out some space for weddings and events, while other malls have built in mini golf courses and aquariums. Urban planners from Buffalo, New York have taken advantage of the spaces in malls for housing and created them into neighborhoods and Columbus, Ohio planners have replaced the City Center mall with a park.

An Abandoned Shopping Mall (Treehugger)

Galleria at Erieview's Gardens Under Glass Education Space offers workers and residents occasional free hour-long seminars on composting (Examiner)

All over the country, malls are either becoming town squares or even being restored to natural environments to contain dog parks and creeks. Ellen Dunham-Jones, a professor at the College of Architecture at the Georgia Institute of Technology, believes planners are giving suburbs an urban center. Many younger Americans are abandoning the traditional shopping experience for a more urban one.  Once these malls become urban, the large parking lots can be turned into outdoor public spaces or areas for developing public transit systems. In Seattle, planners have centered urban developments on their malls and even “restored a creek originally covered by a parking lot” as well as remodeled stores to be closer to the street (Clifford). Ms. Poole, director of marketing events in the Galleria at Erieview, has learned organic gardening and promoted greenhouse efforts which have now produced vegetables and served as a new marketing strategy for the mall’s catering business. This stimulates on local shopping, agriculture, and bringing together a community.