The Decline and Fall of the Mall…

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When was the last time you danced at Walmart or Costco?
Downtown Iowa City offers many things you can’t find at Big Box

From JAY WALLJASPER
Shareable

[See also Why We Need Resilient Communities below... DS]

In December while you were wrapping presents and sipping egg nog, a huge shift was occurring in the American economy—one that will have a major influence on our towns and cities.

What happened?  A lot of Christmas, Chanukah, Kwanzaa and Solstice shopping migrated to the Internet.

It’s been a steady trend for years, but finally hit home in 2012.  After enduring dampened sales over the past three holiday shopping seasons, America’s retailers were counting on a consumer comeback.  Big sales on Black Friday looked promising, but when all the receipts were counted, it was another year of yuletide restraint—at least in brick-and-mortar stores.  Meanwhile Internet sales continued to rise.

After New Years Sears, K-mart and even swank Bloomingdale’s announced nationwide store closings. It’s very likely holiday shoppers will discover even more empty storefronts next December

Similar to the housing bubble that burst in 2008, some places will be more devastated than others. Brooking Institute Real Estate expert Christopher Leinberger documents how many outlying suburban areas were swamped by massive devaluation of housing prices–more than established neighborhoods in cities and inner-ring suburbs.

I think the same will hold true for the coming retail crunch. Downtowns and neighborhood commercial streets can weather the changes better than the malls, strip malls and big boxes that have proliferated across suburbs over the past 40 years. That’s because older business districts have already been forced to diversify. They are no longer where we go only to buy shoes and housewares—they’ve become the place to do yoga, eat tacos, drink IPA, go to the office, hear a singer-songwriter, henna your hair, work out, browse a vintage store, wander through a gallery, and indulge in the pleasure of streetlife.  They function like a commons—giving us a place to experience public life.

We’ll keep coming back to these places for the fun of it, while passing over single-use retail centers like strip malls and big boxes in favor of the Internet’s convenience.

Jan Gehl, a Danish architect and one of the world’s leading authorities on urban revitalization, says this trend is already underway in many parts of the world.  “If you asked people 20 years ago why they came down to Central Copenhagen, they’d say it was to shop,” he explains, based on 40 years of  extensive research.   Now, people report they come to the center because they want to be part of the action in center, although they are spending more money than ever in stores and cafes.
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Why We Need Resilient Communities
From JOHN ROBB

It should be clear, as we watch the gyrations and excesses of global markets, that no organization/state/group has any meaningful control over its direction. The same is true for almost every other aspect of globalization, from the environment to transnational crime to energy flows.

In short, we’ve lost control and our collective future is in the hands of a morally neutral technology system that is operating in ways that we don’t fully understand (nor will we). The best defense against this emerging situation is not to call for new Manhattan projects or global treaties or Marshall plans, which won’t work since we can neither marshal the resources necessary nor collectively agree on anything other than the most basic rules of connectivity, it is to slowly introduce organic stability into out global system. The concept I’ve latched onto as a solution is what I call the resilient community.

This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses — unfortunately, there will be many. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid in the following areas (an incomplete list):

• Energy.
• Food.
• Water.
• Products.
• Security (both active and passive).
• Communications.
• Transportation.

By increasing local production, resilient communities have the ability to preserve wealth and a quality of life despite severe system shocks (from government failures to market melt downs).
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See also New Rules for Radicals: 10 Ways To Spark Change in a Post-Occupy World
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