What malls and convention centers have in common

They are enclosed spaces cut off from the world. They are single use places. And the people who go to them, convention goers especially, aren't interested in venturing elsewhere.

So generally, statements that X convention center or Y shopping mall will do all kinds of miraculous things for the adjacent areas and commercial districts are fatuous. Although, by working very diligently to make connections beyond the building, more positive impact can be garnered. But it's not easy.

The reality of shopping malls starting to change and add other functions isn't very interesting to me, even though it's interesting to a lot of other people, has engendered books such as Big Box Reuse, and many articles in the press.

All it is is a recognition that single use places lose their oomph and must be constantly refreshed in order to remain interesting and relevant. There's nothing new to that recognition, except to the people who didn't know any better.

As people get bored with shopping, and as the prevalence of "retail therapy" diminishes as the ability to spend money frivolously declines, places devoted exclusively to shopping lose their allure as well.

The Boston Globe has a number of recent articles that illustrate this point. "Legacy Place in Dedham puts a new spin on retail" discusses the triumph of lifestyles because they are mixed use destinations with more than retail stores. (And yes, lifestyle centers are modeled after traditional commercial districts, unlike traditional shopping centers, which focus exclusively on retail stores.) From the article:

Hours later, shoppers packed the open-air plaza off Route 1, streaming into Showcase Cinema de Lux to catch new releases such as “The Twilight Saga: New Moon,’’ tearing up the alleys at Kings bowling, gorging on sweets at Sugar Heaven, and hitting the sales at various merchants. While traffic dropped off at other retail outlets after Black Friday, Legacy Place was bustling for the rest of the post-Thanksgiving weekend.

This holiday, Legacy Place is changing the shopping landscape in Massachusetts by spurning such traditional gimmicks as door-buster deals at the break of dawn and photos with Santa. Instead, the Dedham complex is vying to attract customers with its unique combination of entertainment, upscale restaurants such as Met Bar & Grill, New England’s largest Whole Foods Market, and a range of retail options, including the first shopping venue in the state with all three Urban brands: Anthropologie, Free People, and Urban Outfitters.

Open-air shopping meccas such as Legacy Place have gained huge popularity across the country as consumers demand more from their shopping excursions. The number of lifestyle centers, which typically offer specialty merchants along with restaurants and entertainment with easy pedestrian access, has doubled to 434 since 2003. Meanwhile, no new enclosed mall has opened in the United States since 2006. In Massachusetts, about a half-dozen open-air shopping centers similar to Legacy Place have opened since 2003, including Derby Street Shoppes in Hingham and Patriot Place in Foxborough, according to Robert F. Sheehan, vice president of research for KeyPoint Partners LLC, a Burlington firm.

This comes at a cost when traditional commercial districts are unable, for many reasons, to be competitive. See "Dedham Square struggles to coexist with new Legacy Place mall." From the article:

In light of an ongoing metamorphosis in historic Dedham Square, hopes were high this fall that the downtown shopping area would hold its own once the massive Legacy Place lifestyle center sprang up on Route 1.

Town officials anticipated a spillover effect, figuring patrons of the 80 new stores and restaurants, and the 15-screen movie complex a mile down the road would also make a trip to the square to see, taste, and buy what the local shops had to offer.

But that has not happened. Foot traffic in the square is down, with some merchants reporting losses of 40 to 50 percent of their receipts, since the retail complex opened late this summer.

People are lazy, I mean, efficient. They prefer to go to one place and stay there. So unless the new and the old are well integrated, usually the new trumps the old, at least for a long while, and forever if the new continues to be able to be "refreshed" from time to time, while the old stays uncompetitive.

As for convention centers, as Robert Campbell writes in "Expanded convention center must do more than get bigger":

There are economic arguments for and against such an expansion. I’ll leave those up to the financial experts. I’m interested in the quality of city life for the people who live there and those who visit. Looked at that way, a convention center can be - and usually is - an unmitigated disaster. That’s the bad news.

The good news is that there are ways to make these Goliaths into better neighbors. That’s rarely achieved, but it’s possible.

First the bad news. Typical American convention centers are hideous, huge, blank-walled boxes. They’re surrounded by streets that are too wide, in order to accommodate all those trucks, buses, cabs and cars. Approaching such a center on foot, as a pedestrian, you feel alienated and unwelcome. The building divorces itself from its surroundings. It creates a dead zone all around itself, as if it were some kind of toxic infection in the city. There’s seldom much urban life in the vicinity of any convention center.

Often, these places are built far from the center of town, in locations where if you walk out the door there’s no place to go. In Chicago, for example, you feel like you must be in some other state. That’s true in Boston, too. The famous charm of our city is invisible and far away.

So what’s the solution? What makes these places work better? The answer is pretty simple, although hard to achieve. Everything depends on the edges, the periphery, the line of demarcation where the convention center meets the city around it. The center must reach out to shake hands with the city, not isolate itself behind a concrete wall or a moat of traffic.

He goes on to discuss two examples of better connected convention centers that illustrate his thesis, in Philadelphia and San Francisco.

In the meantime, economic development types sell us citizens a bill of goods.