lifestyle centers and faux downtowns

[elecpharm]

is the entire idea of a new town center a bad one? some might sugget that lifestyle centers are only superficially better than a typical strip mall. the majority of these "centers" are designed to look like downtowns, the "main streets" are actually private drives. these new urban malls may consist of separate structures, but the underlying parcels still look like the massive, 50-acre lots of their predecessor malls with private drives cut through. translation: mall security can still kick people out for loitering.

the faux town center has a profit motive, it is not sinister, but it is obscured when it pretends to be otherwise. to quote, "a town is a town. a mall by any other floor plan is still a mall."

Lifestyle Centers And Faux Downtowns

Mason at Archinect points us toward a Boston Globe article featuring the growing popularity of the Lifestyle Center, the current model representing the evolution of the American shopping mall and more important the evolution of the city. The Lifestyle Center is a roofless retail center with clusters of one to two-story buildings housing mostly up-scale retail with the intention of attracting higher-income shoppers while providing them a sense of community. Poor people and riff-raff can have their own community in the Wal-Mart parking lot.

The format is driven by the desire to create "pedestrian-friendly areas that encourage interaction among families or neighbors," who are "looking for the good old days." The architecture decoration used for these developments is in the style preferred by the New Urbanists; buildings vary in size shape and color, and are postmodern interpretations of historic architectural styles meant to evoke a feeling and ambience provided by authenticity. Aesthetically the Lifestyle Center is attempting to evoke the qualities and charms (did they really exist to begin with or were they constructed through myth and the set of Back to the Future?) of the old downtown shopping district, which the enclosed shopping mall failed to provide. The power and success of the shopping mall (via Victor Gruen) however was its ability to adapt to the shifting demographics and infrastructure of the city, becoming a destination one would arrive at by car, and being able to sanitize and control retail space. Enclosure and air conditioning allows comfortable shopping year-round, and the the ability to control the activities and behaviours of those shopping. But the shopping mall is such a blatent representation of a themed control space (via Jon Jerde) that the most sophisticated of shoppers recognize the limits of this model, especially during a period when the limits of suburban and exurban development have become more apparent.

The Lifestyle Center evolves the model of the shopping mall by combining the fictitious qualities of the downtown shopping district with the control mechanisms of the shopping mall. It is still a carefully crafted shopping environment, but with the outdoor charm its target shopping audience have found in vacation destinations such as New York City's Soho shopping district, though devoid of the Eurotrash. But what is most troubling (and maybe most promising) is that the Lifestyle Center is evolving in many parts of the country where exurban development has really taken off, areas that have no relation to or need of the traditional dense urban core. Geographically, exurban development is so far removed from the urban core (beyond the rings of suburban development that preceded it) that it does't make sense to take advantage of any of the activity now provided by the city, which is being revamped to cater to Richard Florida's "Creative Class."

What the Lifestyle Center is in position to do is provide many of the social and cultural amenities exurban development lacks, driven by patterns of development that are web-like or evenly distributed in nature, as opposed to relying on traditional patterns that relied on a legible center that supports a periphery, and vice versa. The exurbs lack an architecture or an object that can be pointed to and named as the place which provides a city identity, where people can collect and gather for civic events, social interaction, and chance happenings.

VgshotBack in May, Karrie Jacobs wrote a piece for Metropolis, The Manchurian Main Street, that examined Victoria Gardens, a retail development in Rancho Cucamonga, California, a sprawling city of over 150,000 people composed of repeating subdivisions that lacked a focal point. As the site was being planned for a shopping mall, the project switched developers and Brian M. Jones, president of Forest City Commercial Development saw an opportunity to make an attraction instead of a stock shopping mall. Jones had realized "What this city really needs is its own downtown."

Jones and his colleagues did research. They visited California's best commercial districts: Santa Cruz, Seal Beach, Long Beach, and San Francisco. They took photos and studied them, trying to isolate the details that add up to authenticity. Then the planning team spent four months hammering out a grid. And they invented a history for the downtown: "We actually storyboarded the thing out from 1854, when the first settlers came, all the way to the present day," Jones recalls. They imagined a ranch, a fruit-packing facility, and decade upon decade of banks and commercial buildings.

The result is an outdoor retail development laid out on a grid with narrow streets and parking meters, buildings designed by different architects with different styles of different time periods to invoke the sense that it had evolved over time, complete with a fabricated history, and background music piped through green Bose speakers concealed in the shrubbery. Rancho Cucamonga now has a downtown and a place for people to gather.

The typical Lifestyle Center, though not as sophisticated with the smoke and mirrors, attempts to provide the same service as Victoria Gardens. Both use the vehicle of shopping as a means to generate an urbanism, and provide a semblance of the components of the traditional city that are missing from contemporary urban development, which is driven by technologies, business models, cultural values, and other factors that have nothing to do with how cities were made 100 years ago. However both examples fail miserably at providing anything more than a pityfully contrived retail development posing as something that its not, using faux-architects who excell at the art of making things that are new look old, complete with a fabricated sense of history and authenticity. Because these mis-guided developments are rooted in the art of deceit and lies, they run the danger of clouding over the real issues that face the city today. While the higher-income shoppers they cater to move through a carefully crafted generic 'urban' experience, the rest of the income brackets (priced out of a Lifestyle Center that likely practices meth-mouth profiling) flock to Wal-Mart and other big-boxes for singles night, weddings, bingo, high school marching bands, and savings, in flourescent lit shells or parking lots that are screaming for a little hot glue gun magic from Christopher Lowell. The developers and architects participating in constructing this physical dimension of the city lack the vision, creativity and problem solving skills to address and engage real solutions grounded in the present; instead they choose to replicate an image of the city that has either failed or has became irrevelant in today's auto-centric culture.

With that said, the Lifestyle Center may be a step in the right direction when addressing retail urbanism, though they have a long way to go. Its inherent structure and organization allows more flexibility in how it can be programmed, developed, and remodeled, or torn down. Some developments are already planning to include different types of housing, commerical spaces, and grocery stores. That increases the chances that a wider spectrum of the population can come together, mix and take advantage of services offered. However those involved need to begin imagining what the future should look like and how it might operate instead of hiding behind an image of the past framing a pseudo experience for the higher income brackets and tastes of an elite few.

Contributors: Emily Andersen. Geoff DeOld. Corey Hoelker