Retrofitting Suburbia

America takes back the bleak suburbs of yesterday and repurposes them into vibrant, interconnected, mixed-use communities.
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From GreenSource
Katharine Logan

Ask Yaromir Steiner, CEO of Columbus, Ohio-based mall developer Steiner + Associates, whether there are too many malls in America, and he'll tell you the short answer is yes. The old formula from the 1970s heyday of malls would see one mall for every 250,000 residents. "As a society we cannot sustain that number of malls," says Steiner, and malls across America are proving him right, dying faster than they're being built, victims of a Darwinian struggle in which big retail battens on small, and huge retail battens on big, leaving abandoned hulks adrift on asphalt seas.

In some cases, where location and demographics are right, moribund malls are being redeveloped as town centers along outdoor streets. In Mount Prospect, Illinois, the redevelopment of failed Randhurst Mall into the new Randhurst Village made headlines in August 2010, as Metro Chicago's first major real estate loan since the banking crisis began. Dubbed "lifestyle centers," these hybrids sometimes carry more than a whiff of the theme park, but their human scale, program synergies, and community impact are real enough.

"They're not just a single-purpose entity designed for today. They're designed to be able to grow," says Brian O'Looney, design architect at Torti Gallas, the firm behind the residential component of Peninsula Town Center in Hampton, Virginia. "What's neat is if you can get it to work where people aren't using their car every day."

Peninsula Town Center reinvented a tired, single-level inward mall into an open-air town center comprising retail, office, and residential uses along pedestrian-scale streets with landscaped parks and public plazas. At 1.1 million square feet, Peninsula is the largest redevelopment project in Hampton's history, earning the city an award from the American Planning Association for the master plan and design guidelines that shaped the changes. "A place can survive without good architecture," says O'Looney, with candor and no small amount of professional humility, "but if you don't have good planning, it's gone."

Peninsula appears to be succeeding despite the economy. It opened in March 2010, with 95 percent of its apartments, over 60 percent of its offices, and close to 90 percent of its retail space leased. According to Steiner, who partnered in Peninsula's development, three fundamental factors account for the project's success. First, it's located in a community that was "keenly interested in reinventing a dying mall into a robust retail project." Second, the site's long-time owners, Mall Properties Inc., had the depth of commitment and pockets to see the project through challenging times. Third, the concept of mall as town center is, says Steiner, "the format of the future; something that will stand the test of time."

At the opposite end of the scale, Jason Roberts and his shallow-pocketed associates at Team Better Block are using imagination, effort, and good will to install pop-up demonstrations of how a block or street can be improved. Their first project, in Oak Cliff, South Dallas, identified a block in the former streetcar suburb where, as Roberts says, "we as a city did everything we could to push away the possibility of a walkable urban neighborhood." To provoke change, Team Better Block constructed a temporary streetscape as a 72-hour art installation. They painted bike lanes on the roadway, and set up potted shrubs, bike racks, pedestrian-scale street lamps, and sidewalk tables. They gussied up vacant buildings as cafes, flower shops, and art studios, enlisted street musicians, and used social media to populate the scene.

The Better Block project was "myth-busting," says Roberts, and the team has subsequently inspired similar projects across the country. "People come out in droves, linger, spend money, and bring their friends back." Perhaps most importantly, the projects overcome resistance to change by helping community members and municipal leaders to see simple, block-level fixes at work. "It helped to get the ordinances changed really quickly," says Roberts of the Oak Cliff project. One of the business mock-ups even ended up staying, at the community's request, and a number of vacant storefronts were rented soon after the project demonstrated their potential.

For their next project, Team Better Block will tackle a thornier problem: further south of Dallas, the neighborhood of Redbird is falling into decay. In a pattern that's playing out in outer-ring suburbs nationwide, a shopping strip loses its anchor; lower quality retail, if any, remains; the perception of the area changes; the middle class moves away; low-income families struggle in their now-segregated and highly undesirable neighborhood, holding two or even three jobs to make ends meet, with transportation costs outstripping housing costs for lack of public transit, and no time to commit to schools, recreation, or each other.

"Everyone deserves a place that matters," says Roberts. "There are houses and families all around these strips." The plan? To use the failed commercial strip to incubate local small business. The twist? "Our opportunity is the parking lot, not the big building," says Roberts. He has in mind European plazas, where a church or civic architecture (in this case, an empty big box) forms a backdrop, shops and cafes animate the edges, and something—water, market, games—holds the middle. Redbird's new market will consist of shipping containers organized as a main street and plaza in the shopping center's parking lot. It's a long-term project, being developed in increments, so organizers can see how the community reacts and respond to what it wants to see changed. They'll have stuff for kids, so they can meet the parents, and ask what they see missing from the neighborhood, what kind of help they need. Maybe they can't get Whole Foods, but how can they get Joe's grocery? The focus, says Roberts, is on what's accomplishable. "Once things implode like that, you just have to go back to the small-town scale and start over," he says. "Not start over by demolishing, but start over with what you have."

REPAIRING SPRAWL

New urbanist planner Galina Tachieva of Duany Plater Zyberk creates a methodology for repairing suburban dysfunction

Let's take a moment to examine Tachieva's tools as explained in her book, The Sprawl Repair Manual. It's fun to spot the tools at work in the retrofit examples here. There'll be a quiz, so pay attention. What Tachieva doesn't include in her toolbox, and each community has to find for itself, is political will and a measure of courage.

URBAN DESIGN SET
The urban design set consists of four tools: new building types to rebalance the program mix, improved and connected thoroughfares to break down big blocks and diversify the mobility scene, rationalized parking to optimize frontages, and open and civic space, including provision for local food production. Simple and yet infinitely adaptable. At the first sign of sprawl, whip out these tools, adapt to circumstances, and get it beat—unless of course the regulatory framework obstructs you. In that case, you'll need the regulatory tool set.

REGULATORY SET
The regulatory set comprises three tools: form-based codes, such as CNU's SmartCode; zoning change for diversity, density, and flexibility; street design; and a continuum of transect zones that allow you to check your plan against a clear rural-to-urban logic. These are the tools that enable the urban design tools to achieve results —assuming of course that developments are being implemented. If they're not, it's time for the implementation tool set.

IMPLEMENTATION SET
The implementation set comprises incentives, such as easier permitting, infrastructure funding, and legislation. And for infrastructure funding, there are finer-scale tools, like how to prioritize projects, and yes, how to fund them.

Illustration courtesy of The Sprawl Repair Manual

 

Katharine Logan is an architecturally trained and LEED-accredited writer based in British Columbia.

 

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Originally published in GreenSource
Originally published in November 2011

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