Malls and urbanism

One of the biggest musical hits of the 90s in Québec was "La Rue Principale" by the group "Les Colocs" ("the Roommates"). The beginning of the song went like this:

Dans ma petite ville on était juste quatre mille
Pis la rue principale a s'appelait St-Cyrille
La Coop le gaz bar la caisse pop le croque-mort
Et le magasin général quand j'y retourne
Ça me fait assez mal!
Y'est tombé une bombe sur la rue principale
Depuis qu'y ont construit: le centre d'achat!

-Les Colocs, la Rue Principale

Translated in English, it would be this:

In my small town, we were just 4000

And the main street was called St-Cyrille

The Coop, the gas bar, the credit union, the funeral home,

And the General Store! When I go back

It makes me hurt so bad!

A bomb has fallen on main street

Since they've built... that shopping center!

-Les Colocs, la Rue Principale

The group sang of course of the collapse of traditional main streets and the rise of one of the most well-known symbols of North American suburbia: the mall.

Promenades Saint-Bruno, the biggest mall near me when I grew up

Malls came to be with the car era when the transport patterns of people shifted to highways and high-speed roads, many of them built in previously unbuilt areas. Developers built huge interior commercial areas near high-speed roads, areas with plenty of traffic and within short travel time from plenty of car-owning households. Big stores ("anchors") were included in the mall, as well as plenty of small commercial locals that could be rented by small stores, that would thrive on the traffic drawn by the "anchors" and the proximity of each other. As land was very cheap, plenty of parking could be built for a very low price.

Meanwhile, traditional main streets often collapsed into irrelevancy. With people going there less and less, and parking requirements making it harder and more expensive to invest in downtown areas, as malls rose, main streets fell.

Consequently, malls were often demonized as one of the pillars of sprawl and car-dependence. To be fair, they were easy to hate, with their huge parking lots and their gigantic blank walls, seemingly breaking every rule of good urban design (fast roads, plenty of surface parking, hard to access without a car, blanks wall all around, etc...).

The inherent weakness of malls

A new phenomenon has happened in recent years: the death of malls. Malls which lose their tenants one by one until the mall become desert and closes. This revealed a fundamental weakness of malls: as they rely on speed rather than proximity to obtain their clients, they become extremely sensitive to congestion and to competition from newer malls at other highway exits.

Since they tend to be far from most of their customers, malls rely on high-speed roads to be within reasonable distance of their clients. However, if through traffic on these high-speed roads increases and causes congestion, reducing the speed that people can travel at, then the mall practically "drifts" away from its clients since it takes more time to get to it. A trip that used to take 10 minutes can now take 15 or 20 minutes. The area the mall reaches suddenly becomes much smaller.

A mall at an highway interchange and the areas within 10 minutes of car travel of it, in blue the area if the highways are uncongested (100 km/h), in red the area if the highways are congested so that average speed is down to 60 km/h.

Also, the location near highways and other high-speed roads is also a curse as it means all malls opening within a few kilometers effectively compete directly with an existing mall, because the speed on the highway means that it takes little time to travel between malls at different exits. If two malls are within 5 kilometers (3 miles) of each other, it takes just 3 minutes to travel from one to the other (at least on uncongested highways). That is the equivalent of two stores within 200-300 meters (700-1 000 feet) of each other if people were walking. So if one mall is rather rundown and a new mall is built within a radius of 5 kilometers, it is likely to cannibalize many of the earlier mall's clients.

Since much of a mall's attraction is dependent on the diversity of stores that reinforce each other, as stores close or move to greener pastures, there is a vicious cycle of stores closing leading more and more people to flee to other malls, accelerating the decline of the stores that remain.

This is unlike commercial streets in dense cities, which tend to remain strong because they have the advantage of proximity with a lot of clients who reside within easy walking distance of them. This guarantees a certain patronage that can usually maintain these streets (unless the population declines).

Are malls inherently anti-urban?

As I said in the intro, malls have been associated with sprawl for decades. But is it a fair association that can never be broken?

After all, if we look at malls and break down what they really are, aren't they pedestrianized commercial areas where one may park once then hang around all they? And indeed, in suburbia many teens took to spending their time at the mall, like previous generations did at town squares and markets, creating the name "mallrat" (which spawned some movies and TV series, notably Kevin Smith's "Mallrats" and the Canadian animated series "6teen", which both illustrate malls as self-contained towns with their own rules and dynamics where protagonists spend their days).

Thinking about it, one could describe malls as essentially the commercial main streets taken outside of cities and put inside one big building. But otherwise, the commercial street is still there, with plenty of small commercial locals for rent, with retail and restaurants, even public plazas and fountains, just like cities. Malls in one way are the commercial part of downtown removed from downtown and put at the periphery of urban areas.

Once you exclude the parking, malls also reveal themselves to be very dense commercial areas, often with a second floor allowing them to pack more commercial space in as little a footprint as possible. Okay, they often do that to have more space for parking, but the same principle could work in an urban area in order to reduce the footprint of a mall and allowing an insertion inside urban areas.

For example:

10-story mall in the center of Kooriyama in Japan, a city of around 350 000 people

So it is very possible to have urban malls, as long as the area around is either very densely populated, well-connected through the transit system and/or that people coming by car are willing to pay for parking in multi-storied structures or in underground parking.

Malls can be a way to add big popular stores in urban areas devoid of them. Not everyone will like it as it may make things harder for local stores due to the competition, but is it better to have an urban mall next to transit nodes or to have malls in car-dependent areas with people inside cities buying cars and using them to go to these malls?

That is not to say that malls are the best way to build commercial areas into cities. Malls tend to complement streets poorly, they suck life out of them by bringing people inside rather than allowing them to mingle outside (a privatization of the public realm), which, to be fair, might be a blessing in extremely hot or cold cities. Traditional commercial streets are more organic and can change piecemeal, whereas malls tend to be hard to change as they're one big building and they feel "artificial". So aesthetically, malls are far from great, yet they can still function as boosts to walkability if used in the right spot because they are walkable commercial areas.

They are also a much lesser evil than the recent alternative that has sprouted up: the so-called "power center", which is completely car-oriented. Say what you want about malls, their location may be car-oriented, but once there, you walk from store to store, it's human-scaled inside. Power centers are not only in car-oriented areas, but their stores are spread apart around huge parking lots. So not only do you need a car to get there, but you also need a car to go from one store to the next, a completely car-oriented shopping environment.

A power center in all its ugliness

A personal loose typology of shopping areas (all examples from the region of Montréal)

The fact that malls are by themselves walkable, dense commercial areas mean that they can be retrofitted into urban areas. It isn't easy, but it can be done, by a combination of building transit links to it so people don't need cars to get there (note that apart from the highest density cities in the world, the idea of malls thriving based mostly on clients living within walking distance is naive, so transit is required, or bikes at the very least), building parking garages to replace all the surface parking (the mall will need continued car patronage while it is being retrofitted), then filling the rest of the parking lots with offices and high-density housing. As they are frequently in greenfield areas, there is also plenty of room for growth around.

Theoretically, a mall could become the "seed" for the downtown of a new city. However, I am not aware of any area that has successfully achieved such a transition. I know that Mississauga in Ontario is attempting it, building high-rise condo towers around its existing malls.

High-rise condo towers being built in relative proximity to a mall in Mississauga

Square One mall in Mississauga City Center, with nearby towers

For the moment, from what I hear, the results are not all that great. The towers are still within "car proximity" rather than "walking proximity", not helped by the gigantic patches of asphalt in the form of parking lots and enormous stroads.