Additional to this ‘theming’ is the accessory attachment of entertainment (picture
houses), and recreation facilities (fitness centres and bowling alleys) as integral
mall components, leading, logically, to the incorporation of upper-level offices and
professional agencies (doctor, dentist, optometrist) – in short all the retail, recre-
ational and office components, and some residential accommodation, combined
and integrated into the mall entity.
It would be a small-town ‘real shops’ conditioning in Britain and Australasia
which inclines me to register some negativity in relation to the glitzy, themed,
muzaked, air-conditioned and ‘pocketbook oriented’ environment of shopping
malls. Nevertheless, it has to be acknowledged that the family car, consumerism,
and the ‘shopping as entertainment’ syndrome do come together at landmarked
malls. If this is to be ‘romantically themed’ on some simulation of an Arcadian or
Old World surrogacy, orchestrated and paid for by entrepreneurs concerned with
fiscal yield from high rents at considerable fiscal velocity, so be it. There are, of
course, considerable shopper and security advantages to be noted in relation to
strip and mall-shopping for a modern, mobile, urban-living consumer society.
Indeed there can be some overall car usage reduction when malls are sited at or
close to the ‘centre of gravity’ of urban populations. In existing larger towns and
cities the shopping mall offers stiff competition to all but the most propitious local
shopping centre and conventional central business district.
The mall is giving way, always the pattern with consumer capture, to
large edge city epicentres providing mixed commerce, work, child care and
entertainment – including within the most advanced prototypes, pre-schools,
and higher educational institutions and some residential apartments. These
mega-centres gain an increased sense of security in association with the increased
density. At the edge of fast-growing metropolitan cities they are distinctive
from ordinary malls in that they do have a life after dark, do provide conventional
office jobs, and are within the commuter range of a mainly female workforce.
To mall enthusiasts they are ‘enjoyable’ because they ‘throb 24 hours a day:
seven days a week’ and because they are ‘safe, secure and fun’. In effect they are
places where retailers have figured out what people like and have set about giving
it to them. As a consequence edge city mega malls offer formidable competition
to metropolitan downtowns and small-town mainstreets. Some people will travel
across town, even across a region, passing ‘ghost malls and dead strips’ to get to
them.
Revitalizing and reclaiming the central business district in larger towns and
cities is a multiplex planning-with-design matter which is well documented and
prescribed for. Beyond the specifics given in the box 5.1 litany of urban social
arrangement and style are some key heritage elements which warrant attention.
These include the need to accord special protection to the places and precincts
of historical significance (such as the nineteenth-century Victorian heritage in
Australasia, and the ‘Chinatowns’ and other early settler heritage of western
United States and Canada), to preserve the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-
century narrow back-alley laneways, to protect significant vistas and landmark
gateways and feature buildings, and to foster the revitalization of an inner-city256 Practice