Third Space in Retail Design Promotes Social Equity

“While architecture history tended to focus on suburban houses, and planning history looked at the highways, the shopping mall fell into the cracks between the personal and the professional, as if we as a culture didn’t want to acknowledge that we needed a wardrobe, furniture and tools for both”

-Alexandra Lange, Meet Me by the Fountain

1956

Edina, Minnesota. Victor Gruen designed the country’s first fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall to capitalize on car-centric America. In the next fifty years, we added an average of 140 malls a year until the term “e-commerce” was introduced. We saw a sharp decline in the performance of malls, leading to “dead malls” or “greyfields.” With familiar anchor tenants going out of business, the malls are left with nothing but a deep sense of nostalgia.?

2020

The country grappled to find a safe footing between social justice events and the pandemic. While we shopped extensively virtually, we also found ways for the dead malls to serve the community in different roles. With more than 12,000 stores announced to close in 2020, the creativity was boundless. We learned to reuse malls as schools, affordable housing, corporate offices, and community centers. Meanwhile, economic impacts of gig-based/ shared employment and micro-entrepreneurship were felt.?

2022

Mall experiences are determined by the economic capacity to shop and eat. Underperforming malls with empty anchor tenant sites are dead. With that, we are quickly losing places of social gathering. The pandemic sent us packing, and as we learned to live and work at home, we also had to entertain the idea of shopping from home. Takeout food and Amazon boxes lined up our porches every day, and the isolation soon needed to be addressed.?

This isolation didn’t stem from lifestyles. It stemmed from how we planned our cities. Heavily reliant on car-based transportation, suburban America wasn’t planned as a mixed-use neighborhood. Today, lower-tier malls are rapidly declining and deteriorating neighborhoods with them.?

Where do we go from here??How do we provide a social impact solution that addresses the ESGs (Environmental, Social and Governance) beyond checking boxes on standards? With the dismantling of traditional malls, how do we envision the new Retail??

WELCOME BACK, THE GRUEN EFFECT.

Coming out of The Great Depression, consumers lacked money to shop on impulse. However, Gruen designed storefront displays that enticed consumers into the store. The design solution was so successful and widely adapted, it was called the Gruen Effect. This time, instead of enticing consumers with shiny displays, the draw will be purpose- and performance-based, focused on the social impact of the retail brand as well as the retail space.?

Development of new retail spaces will be a part of the solution to address multiple community-centered purposes that champion education, health, housing and retail services. Custom tenant mixes will adhere to value-based real estate models instead of short-term profitability. While regenerative design principles have provided value-based models for the redesign of retail and shopping centers,?what if we applied these principles to create a circular economy, a system to keep resources in use for as long as possible??

Read Senior Project Manager Meghana Yoshi's full insights on our blog. Meghana works in Little's Retail Studio. She serves on the AIA Orange County board as a Director for EDI and is a licensing advisor for the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB) .