This is Northgate Mall in Seattle.
It was built in 1950, and it's one of the first shopping malls in the country.
But today, the mall industry has seen better days.
These parking nightmares
sorry, shopping centers
just aren’t what they used to be.
It’s the end of an era for American malls.
And that’s raising the question: what comes next?
The answer might lie in the shopping mall’s original vision.
Believe it or not, the original concept for the American mall
was a lot more urbanist than you might expect.
Architect Victor Gruen envisioned the shopping mall
as a kind of last-ditch effort to bring a little more community to the suburbs.
Gruen was from Vienna, Austria. And he loved the classic European town square:
a public space where people could live, work, shop, and eat.
But when he came to America before World War II,
he found the new suburbs didn’t really have any places like that.
So the shopping mall was born
as a way to inject a bit of urbanism into the heart of the suburbs.
“Side by side on a normal shopping thoroughfare, these same stores would stretch for nearly a mile.
But as part of Southdale's Compact Town Square plan, they're only seconds apart.”
Gruen’s early mall designs had shops
but also cafés, offices, apartments, and civic centers like libraries.
A classic public square built for pedestrians.
Gruen had hoped to eventually even apply this urbanist vision to cities!
He had dreams of walkable downtown districts, completely free of cars.
But when that shopping mall dream encountered reality, it started to fall apart.
Mall developers ditched the housing, offices, and civic centers.
And a lot of independent shops just couldn’t keep up
leaving chains, big box stores, and massive parking lots.
And instead of inspiring downtowns with this vision of urbanism,
these watered down shopping malls just sucked away their customers.
In the end, he ended up denouncing the developments he’d built his career on.
But as for his original idea?
“In terms of the vision of what Gruen was after?
That vision was a very good vision, and one that is coming back.”
Shopping malls are on the downswing nationwide.
And some mall owners see that original urban vision as a lifeline.
Today, more than 250 malls have plans to make themselves a little more like a town square.
So how do you do it?
Let’s imagine you’ve suddenly acquired a mall.
“A typical mall is between 50 to 100 acres.
A community designed around about a 10 minute walk to the center fits very well on about 100 acres.”
First, establish a street grid that’s walkable and bikeable.
Then, incorporate some kind of public gathering space as an anchor.
Maybe that’s a community center, or a park.
Make sure it’s zoned for a mix of uses, as shopping malls were originally envisioned.
“The more uses you can mix in, the better.
You want office so that can help populate your shops and restaurants during the day.
And you want the residences to then help populate them at night.”
And finally: design for what the community wants and needs.
“Does it have an aging population?
High income inequality? Is it dealing with flooding or wildfires?
What are the issues?"
Here in one of America’s oldest malls, something like that might be taking shape.
Northgate is about to get a light rail station.
It’s gonna be a 14 minute ride to downtown Seattle,
and they’re expecting 45,000 people to use the station each day.
That’s changing the entire context of the mall.
And it turns out, there’s a lot you can do with a massive parking lot.
Instead of just adding more stores,
Northgate’s building housing, offices, a hotel, a walkable street network, and a park.
Oh yeah… and also a pro hockey rink…? 🤷🤷🤷
Now, this won’t be the answer for every mall in America.
Seattle is a booming city, with an expanding light rail and a new hockey center.
Malls in other cities have turned into churches or office spaces,
or most simply torn down and just turned into green space.
The point is: a mall is a 100 acre opportunity.
If it’s not working as a mall, do something different.