When the malls come crumbling down

Malls are dying. You usually have to go see something to believe it. However, if you haven't been to one lately because you do most your shopping on the Web and FedEx visits you more than your friendly postman, this isn't so incredible.

The easy explanation is that everyone is buying everything off the Web. In reality, only a very small portion of your spending is transacted online. You still spend most your money offline. Easy to blame the Web but it isn't the culprit for the death of the American mall.

Malls are dying because they were designed for a different era. They worked marvelously at a time when throngs of people all wanted to congregate and buy the same things. Malls were the ultimate mass market machinery. Every Abercrombie & Fitch store is the same across the land. Every mall housed a Gap. The only thing remarkable about every new mall was how big it could be built to break the previous size record and squeeze more mass market retailers onto every floor.

This isn't about square footage vs. bytes. This is about the masses rejecting mass marketing.

Comments

[Terry Minion]

Interesting thought, but very vague. Malls are dying? In what way are they dying? How are people rejecting this so-called "mass marketing" that is the mainstay, as you say, of malldom? Since you say it really isn't being taken up by the online market, where is it going? I don't see it going downtown. In fact, I don't see it leaving the mall. I buy a lot online, but not by rejecting the mall. I don't understand what you are saying, really. Thanks. TM

[Mazarine]

Where I live, in Austin, Texas, there is a mall that is mostly dead, the Highland Mall, but there are plenty of other malls that seem to be alive and well.

Malls are losing their cachet as a desirable place to be, and they're having a harder time keeping stores in them.

We have another kind of mall here, called The Domain. It confirms Christopher Alexander's theory that the square, the public gathering place at the center of the town is where people tend to congregate. There are people living in apartments above shops, a little place where musicians gather and people can sit on benches, and both onstreet and offstreet parking.

We actually go to the Domain to drink tea at the Steeping Room, because it seems like more of a tea house than a shop in a mall. When you leave it, there are trees and benches outside. You can park your car very close by.

If malls were able to redesign themselves around the principles outlined in "A Pattern Language" we would probably be able to "save" malls.

Mazarine
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