Opportunities and Needs

Opportunities... and Needs

That Cores Can Serve

"I have long realized that the entire concept of unifunctional centers is highly questionable." - Victor Gruen¹

"Of America’s approximately 1,800 shopping malls, 140 were obsolete and another 200 to 250 were (in 2001) at serious risk of obsolescence." - Geoffrey Booth²

Our needs and wants grow from our values. If we value clean air, energy saving, justice, a sense of community, beauty and a rich economic and cultural life then these suggest many needs that must be met and many opportunities that we must explore!

The data given above is a tiny sample of the evidence that our cities do not serve our values well. Lewis Mumford, Margaret Mead, Victor Gruen and many other visionaries help us see the opportunities – how we can and should transform existing centers and build new ones to enhance our lives.

A number of outstanding centers, such as those in Chicago, Minneapolis, Seattle, Country Kansas City (Club Plaza), and hundreds in Europe and elsewhere, provide proof that we cans build good centers. And the principles applied in these centers show the way.

Cores and centers can be far more beautiful, more saving and more healthy, culturally, socially and economically. We just must be ready to apply the sound principles that are the basis for success.

Values are discussed in “Why Cores?” and linked materials. They include efficient and fair access to urban opportunity. Good cores do more to serve these values than any other urban form. Examples of the ways good they do this are listed below:

Good Cores	No Cores or Poor Cores
Maximize opportunities within limits of market and reduce auto travel	Limit opportunities, generate more travel
Create strong sense of community, pride, willingness to work together	Foster hostility, alienation, conflict, transiency, reduce public support
Support transit, reduce auto use, encourage walking and exercise	Discourage walking, provide few auto options, increase congestion and pollution and need for parking, etc.
Locate housing and business close to needed services, encourage walking, minimize auto use	Inhibit contact between housing, business and services they need, generate more auto use
Permit and encourage pedestrian movement, reduce auto use and parking	Limit or prevent pedestrian movement, create more auto use, traffic and parking
Preserve and enhance history and culture, attract workers, visitors and business	Show little or no evidence of history or culture, produce a dull, lifeless environment
Assure more adequate and fully used and efficient infrastructure	Build and use infrastructure inefficiently with higher costs
Provide flexibility to respond to changes in markets, technology, etc.	Become obsolete with tendency to deterioration and blight
Use resources more efficiently and provide fairer access to resources and opportunity	Create waste, inefficiency and inequality in the use of resources

Past as well as current problems with blight, deterioration, abandonment of major parts of cities and whole suburbs shows what happens when we fail to build cities that serve us well and value. Good cores are one thing that serve our values and give cities and even rural regions qualities we need.

(Image: Selcuk Family Market) (Caption) “Markets days serve everyone in Turkish village centers hundreds of years old.”

The forces of blight, deterioration and abandonment are not totally in the past. As Booth’s quote shows, one out of five of the country’s major suburban shopping centers are obsolete or in danger of becoming so. This grossly understates the problem by excluding tens of thousands of smaller centers as well much development not in centers. Blight of commercial areas often leads to deterioration and abandonment of whole communities. New development spreads to and pollutes virgin land. And so needs and opportunities grow.

(Image: Ped Street Lights, Ped Zone) (Caption) “Special lights are beautiful day or night in Munich’s pedestrian zones.”

The number of potential centers needing improvement is almost beyond number. Over 47,000 shopping centers are recognized by the International Downtown Executive’s Association (IDEA) in the U. S. Most of these could be targeted for improvement as could thousands downtowns and of individual office and institutional complexes throughout the nation.

Number of Shopping Centers in U. S. by Size (2002)
Less than 100,001 sq. ft.	28,818
100,001 to 200,000 sq. ft.	11,227
200,001 to 400,000 sq. ft.	4,128
400,001 to 800,000 sq. ft.	1,490
800,001 to 1,000,000 sq. ft.	259
More than 1,000,000 sq. ft.	414

Total	46,336

The program of the Urban Land Institute to “Transform Suburban Shopping Centers” recognizes this problem and proposes actions to deal with it. So also do efforts of other organizations such as the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Main Street Program, several state Main Street programs and the New York Regional Planning Association (RPA). But these programs reach only a tiny fraction of existing cores and almost none are aimed at creating new dynamic mixed-use centers.

There is opportunity galore!

¹Gruen, Victor, Centers for the Urban Environment, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1973.

²Booth, Goeffrey, Transforming Suburban Shopping Centers, American Institute Of Planners Annual Convention, Chicago, 2002.