Reviving Dead Malls

摘要

When a malt has seen its best years go by. and ultimately goes into the retail netherworld, is there an afterlife? In a recent competition organized by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, contestants proposed to revive or replace troubled shopping malls with a sports center for high school students, facilities for seniors, a complex of art galleries, a strip of greenery extending into wetlands, a zoo, and a prison. These are the latest remedies being offered to the owners of America's failed shopping centers, victims of ferocious competition and stagnant demand. Nearly a fifth of America's 2,000 targe-scale regional malls are dying or declining, according to the study Greyfields into Gotdfietds: From Failing Shopping Centers to Great Neighborhoods, commissioned in 2001 by the Congress for the New Urbanism. With the nation mired in recession, the number of imperiled retail complexes is bound to grow. The National Endowment for the Arts, which has commissioned earlier studies on the adaptive reuse of movie palaces and railroad stations, recently published Sprawl and Public Spaces: Redressing the Mall, and it funded the Los Angeles Forum's ideas competition, Dead Malls.