re: American MALL going AUTO
Malls of the United States had its glorious days. After the very first enclosed shopping mall in the United States, the Southdale Shopping Center in Edina, Minnesota, opened its door in February 1957, it supported and enriched the lives of the people for decades. It was "the thing" to do. People visited shopping malls with friends, families, and their loved ones not only to spend money but to spend time, a good time. Victor Gruen, the man known as father of the modern shopping mall in the U.S., envisioned his creation to be "European Plaza" for Americans, perhaps "American Plaza". Pedestrians, spectators, shoppers and retailers all mingled and engaged in the sacred activity of shopping for years.
However, its heyday has passed. The shopper fled to online malls and social media when almighty internet came around. People stopped going to the mall to spend time and money. Shopping malls were already going through its slow and painful death. Developers, architects, and retailers saw the death coming but weren't expecting this complication, the virus without the cure, COVID-19. Shut-down closed retail shops, many of them are closed for good. Anchoring stores are filing bankruptcies. People are afraid of being around mass crowd of strangers. It completely tackled what a mall is all about.
Our way of shopping has changed as we entered the generation of internet and information. Shopping malls no longer are sufficient. We can reach and gather information on goods all around the world within a second. We even can buy stuff from literally the other side of the globe and have it delivered to the door. Goods come to us instead of us going to a store and finding them.
What about “do you want to hang out at the mall?” culture? Spending time at the mall does not entertain people anymore. People look for uniqueness instead of something you can find anywhere. Local restaurants are so much more appreciated than national-wide franchise restaurants. Farmers markets team up with local businesses thrive in any city, LA, San Francisco, New York you name it, where people gather to enjoy what’s specific and unique to the environment. This is where people finally put down their phone and start looking around.
Metrocenter is one of those pathetic shopping malls freshly closed in July due to the downturn of the economy. It used to have three anchor malls and one free standing Wal-Mart. It is very likely that the shopping complex will never find a new tenant for the anchoring shops. Yet, this is an opportunity to re-design and create a complex that’s completely opposite of the Wal-Mart which is a worldly spread big box market offering the exact same things regardless of its location.
Currently, there are 396,318 small businesses, according to the most current federal data available. Of those 396,318 small businesses in Arizona, 107,018 have employees. The remaining 289,300 are Arizona small businesses that have no employees. Phoenix, Arizona is a business friendly city where individual can start their own businesses with less hassle. It attracts so many small business owners, yet, due to its growth, real-estate market is relatively challenging for those business owners. The city needs a mall where it can get so many tenants with lower rent. Needs of small business owners after COVID-19
1) Low rent
2) Does not need space for 7 days a week
3) Unique local place-ness
This proposal suggests re-inventing current Metrocenter shopping center structure and building a massive automated parking garage. But, instead of cars, stores are house. Taking the idea of automated parking garages built in places where land values are super high to provide reasonable parking fees, small business stores will be stored in those compartments when not activated for customers.
The building utilizes currently existing structure to house moving modular pods where stores are setup for display. Basic structures are consisted of regulated grid dimension. Stores are set on the unit plates seating on top of the moving parts. Think of the automated parking garage where individual plates (with cars) navigating around the entire structure as needed. Mobile units can navigate through the entire structure to ‘park’ where they want their stores to be located. This not only will solve economical, spatial issues for the small business tenants in town, but also provides diverse shopping, and Instagram-able, experience for the customers.
Let’s bring people back for NEW AUTOMATED SHOPPING!