theboxtank

Multiple Scales Of The Big-Box Corridor

A site is influenced by and operates at a multitude of scales, ranging from the metropolitan to the regional, to the local.

At the metropolitan scale, a site serves as a detail, often as a component that results from a larger planning scheme or ecological system. The reading and legibility of the site at the metropolitan scale is more diagrammatic than visible.

The site is directly engaged by its context at the regional scale. Hard and soft edges attempt to define limits and boundaries, while controlling access to the site. Overall organizational relationships to a site's context are apparent at this scale.

The local scale of a site describes a site's internal spatial and organizational relationships. Physical and material relationships are described relative to the programmatic organization of the site. At the local scale, the oppositional system of pairs is at it's strongest - pairs such as figure/ground, object/space, here/there, and stim/dross attempt to simplify both the reading and use of the site experience.

Previously [theboxtank]

'Sprawled Out' Launches

Wisconsin blogger John Michlig has launched Sprawled Out: The Search for Community in the American Suburb, a project which will follow the community planning process in Franklin, Wisconsin which will see an increase in development and building in the next year.

Posts so far have ranged from an examination of collector roads, to the setback.

The Project Begins [Sprawled Out]
image by Sprawled Out

Life & Times Blog Looks At Wal-Mart & Land-Use

Los Angeles area PBS station Life & Times has launched a blog to "provide a venue where people can express their views and engage in dynamic, educated discussions about provocative issues of the day in Southern California."

A recent post, Wal-Mart Scales Back provides a brief look at land-use politics and Wal-Mart's relationship with local municipalities. Land-use attorney Ralph Saltsman says, "What is at issue in the Wal-Mart stories is whether municipal governments are abusing their power and exceeding their discretionary limits by making land-use decisions for political reasons. In doing this, cities are ignoring the issues, which should be governing how councils approach a Wal-Mart application. The question should not be how effective lobbying efforts are before city councils, but what is a good use for a site in terms of community service."

Wal-Mart Scales Back [Life & Times Blog]

Richland, WA Uptown Shopping Center

Continuing a brief two-part series looking at retail centers in Richland, WA we shift our attention to Richland’s Uptown Shopping Center, a large strip mall up the road from The Parkway, built some time in the 1940’s. The Uptown Shopping Center is home to some 80 businesses, ranging from the cliché craft store typically found in dying malls and third-tier strip malls, to restaurants and bars that have been tenants at the mall for over 40 years. None of the businesses are of the caliber found in medium to high-end retail centers or representative of national chains such as the Banana Republic or Victoria’s Secret. The older tenants remain to be represented by their original signage characteristic of 1960’s roadside architecture, giving the impression that time has stood still for the last 30 to 40 years.

The strip mall sits in the middle of the proverbial sea of parking which appears as though it could never be filled to capacity during normal business hours. The shops and businesses face all four sides of the mall, with a service road / corridor running down the middle of the length of the mall. Pedestrian malls periodically cross the mall, populated with the requisite landscaping and park benches popular in Entourage catalogues. The architectural styling of each of the businesses represents a wide range of styles – nearly all installed during the early years of this mall – and representing a mish-mash of disparate styles that the designers of today’s Lifestyle Centers claim help to give these newer malls the feeling that they have been built up and grown over time in the same way a real Main Street or city would.

While the Uptown Shopping Center could clearly be categorized as a dying mall or strip-mall, its position in this small city gives it potential to be a significant place of urban significance and public space. Richland is one of three cities that comprise the Tri-Cities – all similar in size and without a downtown of any significance. Richland’s downtown is The Parkade, a sort of centerpiece in a fictitious arts district that is an arts district more so in name than in substance. Kennewick’s downtown (one of the other cities) is maybe less impressive and might better serve the city if it were to be flattened and turned over to alfalfa fields, rather than to be strung along and resurrected as another arts district in name. If the Tri-Cities were to have a ‘downtown’ of any significance, it would be the centrally located Columbia Center Mall.

The Uptown Shopping Center is in a unique position of being able to provide the city of Richland a useful centerpiece and framework for outdoor public space. The over-sized parking lot, which surrounds the mall, has the potential to serve activity other than that of parking. The continuous asphalt surface has the potential to be reclaimed as either temporary or permanent building. It was the site of temporary fireworks shanty over the 4th of July weekend, though the population and density of Richland doesn’t likely warrant additional retail or office space. As with most surface parking lots, it would easily lend itself to a landscaping strategy that turned the outer edges of the lot to ecological uses, ranging from vegetative space that captures runoff or absorbs the hot desert sun. It could also host agricultural use. During my visit to the shopping center a 10-year-old boy was collecting cherries from one of the cherry trees in the parking lot.

The mall appeared to be most active in the evening as it is host to a nightlife district often reserved for Main Street or Downtown. Three to four bars along one side of the shopping center mimic strings of bars found along main drags in college towns. The parking lot in front of this strip is nearly full, and groups of young people congregate on the sidewalks outside of the strip mall, activating the space of the parking lot. It appears to provide Richland with its closest semblance to public space, yet this is completely accidental.

Uptown Shopping Center [Flickr]

Main Street As A Lifestyle Center

The Parkway in the downtown Richland, WA Three Rivers Arts & Entertainment District is a former "Main Street" that has recently been landscaped and stylized in such a way that it feels like what a Lifestyle Center strives to be (or The Parkway is striving to be a Lifestyle Center, without the Banana Republic). The appropriate amount of planters, brick pavers, sidewalk seating, light poles with banners, and water features, give this street a sense of faux nostalgia found in most Lifestyle Centers. Except in some instances there is a tinge of authenticity found in the buildings and businesses that have survived from the early beginnings of this street, as in the case of Ganzel's Barbershop which dates back to 1944 (which I had the pleasure of visiting for the first time in 25 years), or the Richland Theater that anchors one end of the street.

The Parkway [Flickr]

Documentary "Urbanscapes" Opens In Manhattan

'Urbanscapes,' a Documentary on the Decaying of Neighborhoods [NY Times]
image by Filippo Romano

New Suburbanism In Newsweek

Joel Kotkin writes in Newsweek about the new suburbanism.

Building up the Burbs [Newsweek]

The Jews Of Wal-Mart

In The New York Times, Michael Barbaro looks at the changing demographics in Wal-Mart's hometown of Bentonville, Arkansas, where Hindus, Muslims and Jews are brought to this Bible Belt town to work for Wal-Mart or one of its suppliers:

Surrounded by Christian neighbors, Bible study groups, 100-foot-tall crucifixes and free copies of the book "The Truth About Mary Magdalene" left in the seating area of the Bentonville IHOP, the Jews of Benton County say they have become more observant in — and protective of — their faith than ever before.

In Wal-Mart's Home, Synagogue Signals Growth [NY Times]

Wal-Mart Creeping To Western Banks Of Manhattan

Wal-Mart Opens Doors in Kearny Just 7 Miles from NYC [Wal-Mart Facts]

Intersections Scare & Confuse Omaha Drivers

The Omaha World Herald looks at the city's "vexing intersections" that scare, annoy, frustrate, and confuse drivers.

Vexing intersections throw drivers a curve [Omaha World Herald]

Website As A Graph

Via BLDGBLOG, any website viewed as a graph.
Above image is theboxtank.

Cartography of links [BLDGBLOG]

Wal-Mart May End Music Censorship

Labels hope Wal-Mart lifts ban on explicit CDs [Reuters]
Wal-Mart Being Sued For Selling Bad Music With Bad Words [theboxtank]

Cul-De-Sacs Under Attack

Via Archinect, the cul-de-sac is explored at NPR.

Cul-de-Sacs: Suburban Dream or Dead End? [NPR]

theboxtank: Yahoo! Pick Of The Day

theboxtank is proud to be today's Yahoo! Pick.

Optimized Nodes & Wasted Space: Paper Abstract

The Big-Box Corridor: Optimized Nodes & Wasted Space

This paper will examine the potential of the big-box corridor as a site for urban intervention, recognizing that retail distribution strategies drive the essence of this landscape, which can be characterized as a balance between an optimized networks of nodes distributed in a landscape of wasted space. This project contributes to an ongoing investigation into the relation between retail and urbanism, which has previously focused on the idea of the Wal-Mart Supercenter as a Megastructure. (1)

The big-box corridor – the generic retail strip found in any suburban or exurban city is an urban node worth considering as a potential model of contemporary public space, as traditional public venues – streets, squares, green spaces – have been obsolete for over fifty years. (2) Yet the traditional urban typologies for gathering in public space have failed to escape the public’s imagination, due to lack of an adequate substitution. The recent proliferation of Lifestyle Centers (outdoor shopping centers styled to mimic Main Street and other small town characteristics, ie: streets, squares, green spaces) reflect this failure as pattern book architectural motifs are shoe horned into an urban landscape driven by hyper-efficient distribution systems and transportation infrastructure that serve the “just in time” economy. Meanwhile the buildings and spaces that constitute the big-box corridor are completely devoid of design merit.

The big-box corridor results from the intersection of transportation infrastructure and the standalone buildings occupied by national retailers such as Wal-Mart, Home Depot, Blockbuster and T.G.I.Friday’s. The resulting spaces can often be characterized as “in-between”, “residue” and “leftover”; and can be found between the Interstate Highway System, regional highways, arterials, and the retail stores that serve as destinations, or nodes, along the transportation network system. This is the space of the ubiquitous island, right of ways, parking lots, and the interstitial space between multiple retail big-boxes, small-boxes, and speculative strip malls organized on a single developer’s retail pad.

The optimization required for the development of this retail landscape results in stimulated nodes or points of hyper-efficiency; the built representation of the mechanisms of distribution and consumption. The interiorized space of retail, the ambience of the shopping experience is the location of stimulation. Outside of this optimization is the space of waste, or the residue of experience. It is in the intersection between retail and infrastructure where residue occurs. (3)

This residue has the potential to be the site of a critical and creative design inquiry as suburban and exurban-centric urban planning discourse gains traction, and big-box retail sites offer a wider range of consumer products and civic services. One-stop shopping is evolving into one-stop urbanism as the Supercenter, Wal-Mart’s most sophisticated model, includes most or all of the services found in the historic Main Street, including the chance urban events and interactions found in most cities. As designed today, the big-box corridor is organized to facilitate the buying of merchandise, as opposed to facilitating the urban activity of shopping. (4) The residue space found in the big-box corridor can be optimized to provide a framework for shopping and other mixed urban activity.

Lifestyle Centers In The News

The Real Estate Journal looks at Lifestyle Centers (Fake Suburban Towns).

Fake Suburban Towns Offer Urban Life Without the Grit [Real Estate Journal]

The Reality Of Wal-Mart & Organic Product

Writing for the New York Times Magazine, Michael Pollan looks at what Wal-Mart's move to organic will mean for the organic foods industry.

As with anything Wal-Mart does, the bad is coupled with the good: Wal-Mart's scale will educate consumers and make organic product cheaper and more available. And to do so organic food can not be produced in a sustainable manner, while the definition of 'organic' will come under extreme pressure.

Mass Natural [NY Times Magazine]

Drosscape: Wasting Land In Urban America

Alan Berger, Associate Professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard's GSD, has published Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America through the Princeton Architectural Press. A survey and elaboration of the idea of dross, a term used in Lars Lerup's (who provides the postscript) Stim & Dross: Rethinking the Metropolis, Drosscapes proposes a way of thinking about and approaching dross, or "the landscape leftovers, or wastescapes, typically found in-between the stims and undervalued for many reasons (pollution, vacancy, natural conditions unsuitable for building, unprofitability, etc.)." Stims are identified as places and buildings developed for specific use and habitation.

Landscape architects must learn to accommodate these wastelands along with the more traditional challenges of site and construction. This will require a radical reconceptualization of thinking about landscape before potential solutions can be effectively addressed or devised. Ten cities are exam-ined both visually and analytically through the use of aerial photography and geospatially derived maps, charts, and graphs.

After defining and characterizing the processes that create dross, Berger defines drosscaping as "the placement upon the landscape of new social programs that transform waste (real or perceived) into more productive urbanized landscapes to some degree". Drosscaping doesn't aim to eliminate dross or waste, recognizing both to be necessary and inevitable by-products of horizontal urbanization and growth, but is rather an attempt at shifting dross from its position at a marginalized edge (or categorized as "the other"), more toward the center where designers "must discern which types of 'waste' may be productively reintegrated for higher social, cultural, and environmental benefits".

Drosscape: Wasting Land in Urban America [PA Press]

Couple Marries At Wal-Mart

Couple Gets Married At Local Wal-Mart [WUSA9.com]
Couple meet, marry at Wal-Mart [Winston-Salem Journal]

Andrés Duany, New Urbanism Featured In New York Times

New Urbanist Andrés Duany gets a close-up in today's New York Times, speaking briefly about the roots and history of New Urbanism, within the context of the current situation in the Gulf Coast.

Reed Kroloff gets equal time in the piece, and comes across as contrarian for contrarianism's sake:

By speaking the language of developers so effectively, Mr. Kroloff asserts, New Urbanism has come to monopolize urban planning. The congress, he said, is "the only truly organized voice in planning in the United States and has become the most important force in architecture, with the exception of Frank Gehry, in the last 30 years.""The development community loves New Urbanism," Mr. Kroloff added. "It speaks to the sentimentality that seems to underlie Americans' home-buying habits. And creating higher density per acre allows developers to make more money. There is no organized contradictory voice in planning."

It's time for Mr. Kroloff to leave this debate. Aesthetics aside, any organized voice that has learned to work with developers, and create higher density while getting American home-owners to buy into it should receive some praise and credit for doing what those in Mr. Kroloff's "contradictory" camp have failed to do thus far while getting hung up on aesthetics.

An Architect With Plans for a New Gulf Coast [NY Times]
image by Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company