Strip malls — once anchors of postwar North American suburban neighborhoods — are doomed, with thousands across Canada and the US already derelict and eyed by land developers.
However, at least one Canadian academic sees value in maintaining the ubiquitous local retailing plazas and has amassed proposals, such as adding community gardens or toboggan slides, or morphing them into giant bee hives or parking lots for food caravans.
“Strip malls were once the economic hubs of new suburbs,” said Rob Shields, a sociology professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, who received a government grant to rethink strip malls so that they can benefit the communities around them.
Photo: Bloomberg
For more than 50 years, retailers favored the rows of boxy single-story shops opening onto a common parking lot facing major roadways bringing commuters driving between their suburban homes and downtown workplaces.
However, they are losing favor because of rising fuel prices, traffic congestion and city planners’ demands to make cities denser as part of a drive for more “walkable” cities.
More than 11 percent of strip malls in North America are derelict, representing 28 million square meters of vacant retail space, according to the Washington-based Urban Land Institute.
The rest are arguably in decline.
City planners such as Winnipeg’s Jeff Palmer view strip malls as “retail relics.”
“They reflect a time and a place that is no longer environmentally sustainable or economically viable. They do nothing to add to the vibrancy of a neighborhood and they don’t encourage walking, communicating or socializing,” he said.
They once housed banks, dry cleaners, drugstores, post offices and video stores all in one convenient location.
However, retailing has changed. Video stores lost out to online downloading, while superstores now sell groceries as well as other goods and services all under one roof.
“If they’re going next door for a product or service, why not keep them in-house,” John Williams, a senior consultant with retail consulting firm JC Williams Group, said of superstores.
Developers, meanwhile, would rather build regional “power centers” — big strip malls that pack in more stores and two or three anchor tenants locked into 20-year leases providing more stable cash flows.
And owners increasingly view “not very pretty” strip malls as “superb redevelopment opportunities,” said Ed Sonshine, CEO of RioCan Real Estate, which owns more than 100 strip malls in Canada and the US.
Sonshine turned a 2,100m2 strip mall in Toronto into a seven-story condominium building with retail stores on the ground floor and three levels of underground parking.
The main argument for strip malls is that they allow some form of neighborhood retailing to survive, said Palmer, “so that we’re not all driving 5km to buy milk.”
Some have been transformed into restaurant plazas, which have proved to be popular. Food retailing is one of the few still strong segments in retailing.
Shields, along with cities researcher Merle Patchett, held a design contest to generate new ideas to transform others. The top entries from 11 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Egypt, Germany and Iran, are posted at www.strip-appeal.com.
“There’s still a demand for local retail services and these facilities are standing there and so the question is, how can they be reused to make suburbs more vibrant and more sustainable?” Shields said.
Many of the proposals were hashed out by the communities they seek to change. Shields plans to put on display the finalists at city halls, starting in Buffalo, New York, hoping to generate support for salvaging strip malls.
However, Sonshine offers a more sober view. Eventually all strip malls will be redeveloped, he says, “because the land will become too valuable and there is a natural limit to what retailers will pay in rent, whereas the redevelopment potential will keep growing.”
A finalist in Shields’ contest came to the same conclusion and urged stripping Buffalo’s Central Park Plaza for parts: 4,700 bricks, 12,500 concrete blocks, 1,000 ceiling tiles, 120 steel beams, 125 wood panels, 20 aluminum door and window frames, and 600 sheets of steel decking.
Taiwan Transport and Storage Corp (TTS, 台灣通運倉儲) yesterday unveiled its first electric tractor unit — manufactured by Volvo Trucks — in a ceremony in Taipei, and said the unit would soon be used to transport cement produced by Taiwan Cement Corp (TCC, 台灣水泥). Both TTS and TCC belong to TCC International Holdings Ltd (台泥國際集團). With the electric tractor unit, the Taipei-based cement firm would become the first in Taiwan to use electric vehicles to transport construction materials. TTS chairman Koo Kung-yi (辜公怡), Volvo Trucks vice president of sales and marketing Johan Selven, TCC president Roman Cheng (程耀輝) and Taikoo Motors Group
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
RECORD-BREAKING: TSMC’s net profit last quarter beat market expectations by expanding 8.9% and it was the best first-quarter profit in the chipmaker’s history Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), which counts Nvidia Corp as a key customer, yesterday said that artificial intelligence (AI) server chip revenue is set to more than double this year from last year amid rising demand. The chipmaker expects the growth momentum to continue in the next five years with an annual compound growth rate of 50 percent, TSMC chief executive officer C.C. Wei (魏哲家) told investors yesterday. By 2028, AI chips’ contribution to revenue would climb to about 20 percent from a percentage in the low teens, Wei said. “Almost all the AI innovators are working with TSMC to address the
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”