The Mall Turns 60 - Time to Retire?

Emily Badger, writing for The Atlantic Cities, has a fascinating piece about the history of suburban shopping malls. Malls aren’t doing so well and are not-so-surprisingly morphing back into mixed use Main Streets:

Americans haven’t particularly outgrown the consumer impulse that Gruen detected. We still love to flock to dense agglomerations of Body Shops and Cinnabuns and Brookstones. But now those places look increasingly like open-air “lifestyle centers,” with condos above or offices next door. Some of these places are just the old mall in a new Main Street disguise. But when you add residences, and cut Gruen’s mega-block into what actually looks like a downtown street grid, that begins to change things.

This is a return to the natural order. Our 60 year experiment has proved disadvantageous and it’s time to retire the mall and reorient our retail back into mixed use, walk able Main Street districts.