Dawn of the Dead Mall
The landscape is littered with the giant carcasses of failed retail emporia. Ideas for what’s next are no less visionary. But are they any more practical?
Popularity: 17% [?]
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Urban news [almost] daily.Archive for Big Box
Living above the store
Paul Buck has spectacular views of downtown Vancouver from the two glass walls of his condo, which wow everyone who walks in. But what really impressed one of Mr. Buck’s friends, in from a town near the Yukon border, is that he lives over a giant Home Depot.
Popularity: 47% [?]
Living above the store
All-in-one projects with retail, residential and office components are attracting attention. But not everyone is onboard.
Popularity: 48% [?]
Inner-city L.A. hungers for good grocery stores
East L.A. resident Olga Perez has to take two buses to a store about eight miles away to get fresh fruits and vegetables, or decent cuts of meat, for her family.
“The only thing I can get at my corner store are spoiled or expired,” explains Ms. Perez, a dental assistant and single mother who lives in a two-bedroom apartment with two daughters and a granddaughter.
The round trip costs her $5 and limits what she can carry home. “I can only get so much milk and when I get home the eggs are cracked and the bread is smashed,” she says.
Popularity: 24% [?]
Creating Neighborhood Capital from Strip Malls
Strip malls are in virtually every American city, but they’re rarely an important part of those cities. Ava Bromberg says they can be. Her idea is to turn strip malls into community-owned hubs that generate capital within their neighborhood and keep it there.
More…
Popularity: 45% [?]
A (Radical) Way to Fix Suburban Sprawl
Some 120,000 people work in Tysons Corner, Va., but only 17,000 live there. To transform this hotbed of suburban gridlock into a green, walkable city, a soon-to-be-adopted plan-as envisioned by our artist-calls for as much as tripling the current square footage by expanding upward, with the tallest buildings located next to four new train stations, which should be completed by 2013.
Popularity: 72% [?]
Making Grocers more Appetizing to Developers
On May 16th, New York City unveiled a new initiative, Food Retail Expansion to Support Health (FRESH), which combines zoning changes and some financial incentives to make it less costly for developers to include supermarkets in their projects, and to allow the construction of supermarkets in light manufacturing districts without a special permit.
The initiative applies to four areas of the city with the least access to healthy, fresh food: the South Bronx, Upper Manhattan, Central Brooklyn, and Downtown Jamaica. The Bloomberg administration hopes the rezoning will stimulate the growth of supermarkets in these neighborhoods, and in so doing, provide more equitable access to food, promote healthier eating, and reduce the incidence of diet-related diseases.
Popularity: 23% [?]
After the mall: retrofitting suburbia
As it once sucked the life out of Main Street, the suburban mall is being reconsidered – or torn down – as towns move back to the concept of a multiuse town center.
Popularity: 39% [?]
Dead malls
Today, nearly 20 percent of the 2,000 largest malls in the United States are failing, according to an interview in Newsweek with Ellen Dunham-Jones, author of “Retrofitting Suburbia,” a collection of case studies of suburban property redevelopments and the director of the architecture program at Georgia Institute of Technology.
Popularity: 48% [?]
The Last Shopping Mall? New Jersey Awaits Xanadu
It rises out of the tidal murk of the Meadowlands — the polluted northern–New Jersey wetlands on which the sports complex of the same name was built some 33 years ago — like a garish species from a monster movie. What is that swamp thing? It’s a mishmash of big-box structures covered in aqua, blue and white tiles, with a little mustard yellow and brown thrown in to finish off the 1970s-nightmare look. Part of the complex, still under construction, is shaped like a ski jump, because what says industrial metropolitan America quite like a Nordic sport?
Popularity: 38% [?]