You see this a lot in European city centres too, often the malls are "hidden in plain sight" many of them using the facades of existing buildings ( but vast open malls inside, meaning they knocked down the internals and built a mall inside, basically. And often they're transit hubs, serving other roles such as bus stations, metro stations, regular rail stations, etc. So the end result is a lot of people visiting them without a car.
@@Glenni91N yup, Leadenhall market is a great one. More of an arcade than a mall, but definitely closer to the original definition of mall than the america shopping bunk things. Tokyo had a few great ones when I was there, too. All the character of a major shopping street with the shelter and enclosure of an arcade
I've been to that mall in the beginning. Couldn't even find it for 10 minutes because the outside is unmarked, windows blacked out; it looks borderline abandoned. On the plus side, it has an awesome retro game store inside :)
Was able to buy me a Gameboy advanced from there a few years back. The only thing good in that mall is the movie theater though. Idk if Santa Maria has a downtown anyway lol
The Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, Australia is a good example of the festival marketplace! When I lived there I loved that they converted so many older buildings into these community spaces because it kept the character and history of the buildings. Also like you’d said there not sterile at all. I loved it. Totally different from Las Vegas where I live now, unfortunately
Yeah, both the Queen Victoria and the George St Mall are nice ways of getting those big retail centres without absolutely killing nearby areas, but I do vastly prefer the Queen Victoria. Still, they are great for a "downtown mall".
I would love to see a video on Toronto's underground PATH system. Not sure what other cities have similar systems, but it connects the downtown core by a network of shopping and dining areas. It allows for extensive pedestrian travel under the city, separate from cars and its transit connected. Bonus for providing a sheltered route between buildings during the winter. Sadly almost all the shops remain closed because of the pandemic and the rise of work from home.
Like others have said, there are similar systems in Canada, but the PATH during its peak was amazing, and the buildings were still very slowly trying to add programming during evenings and weekends. If COVID didn't happen possibly by mid 2020s the PATH would be open more on Saturdays and evenings. Canadian pedestrian systems vs how it is in many american cities are fortunately better and are in the right direction. Not as intense as Asia, but on the right path.
Montreal does this very well. Department stores, chains, and local busines all thrive in separate buildings that are all connected by a massive underground city. It's a great hybrid use of space that's particularly brilliant when you consider the snow and the cold. You can navigate a huge chunk of the city completly underground or at worst pop out from an entrance 20 feet from where you need to be and only need to navigate one snowbank.
I'm not sure why people think these downtown malls in Montreal are a good thing. Eaton's and Simpson's and Ogilvy's are all gone. As with Toronto's PATH, they take life from the street. Ever go by the Faubourg on a Sunday morning? Depressing.
I am from Santa Maria and I can confirm that mall is wack. By the time I graduated highschool a number of years ago, it was actually dominated by a number of sports facilities like a skatepark, batting cages, dance studios, martial arts facilities, and others. It was wild. I love seeing my hometown in your video!
In Toronto, we have the huge Eaton Centre mall. It’s a modern mall that’s interconnected with a myriad of transit options. Subway, two streetcar lines, underground PATH, etc.
100km west of Toronto is my hometown, Brantford. Downtown mall killed any retail left downtown, then the mall died it's own death. These days, urban renewal is driven by a University campus. A creative solution, that camnuse both historic buildings (eg. city library building became the main building of campus), and newer buildings (eg. small movie theatre became a lecture hall)
One of the negatives about downtown malls does also seem to ring true for Eaton's, though: the shops along Yonge Street next to the mall really seem to struggle since the mall foot traffic rarely goes to them
As @symhwind pointed out. I'd suggest looking into the Prudential/Copley Mall Back Bay area as a better example of a Mall within a city. The Prudential Mall and Copley Mall are connected via a walking bridge and link directly into Public transit on both the Orange Line and Green Line trains. its also in the middle of both business and residential areas as ts across the street from Newbury St. which is a big shopping/restaurant/residential area. Both malls support the Back Bay and South End residential areas, which are pretty dense with people living there.
@@r.pres.4121 Why is that? Given that the majority of people live in urban areas, creating vibrant, flourishing, uplifting, and picturesque urban cores makes a lot of sense. I live in Middelburg, the Netherlands, and its town centre exudes charm and delight.
@@jh-wq5qn They could be referring to malls that offer nice experiences. There is a mall near me that I could walk to with a lot of privately owned small restraints, a stage where local musicians some time come to play, a library with free to use computers, a large chess board and pieces where people can play or watch people play chess, a game shop that lets you freely try out games and a grocery store in case you quickly need to buy one or two things for dinner. It's even right next to the park. I go there some times just to hang out and it's fairly popular. That's the kind of mall I think we should have more of because it's like a community center.
What infuriates me, is that a lot of the UK ones( even more extreme in Germany) were build when decline was already happening in US. Should have learned from their failures...
recently went to Westfield Stratford, in Stratford, London it’s a hugggggge mall in east London but was designed to be easily accessible by public transport and connects easily to the queen Elizebeth Olympic Park and downtown Stratford. nowadays most people arrive by train and use the surrounding park!
Westfield Stratford is a lot better, than Westfield white city. White city one is far too large for comfortable walking. Once you're in you'll have to walk for years to get back to public transport.
Yes Westfield Stratford follows the idea of many large malls in East Asia, especially Tokyo and Shanghai. They are quite transit-oriented, have lots of openings to street, fit inside blocks, and does not have sprawling surface parking lots. I personally prefer this type of shopping malls than American ones.
I've been there, in fact I even bought my previous phone there, but I'd still prefer a traditional shopping street. Malls are really sterile and you can't really hang out there without buying anything. They kill local shops without bringing any real benefits to anyone other than big corporations.
@@eastpavilion-er6081 "American ones"? all types of shopping malls exist in America, built to meet specific regional or city needs. and aren't all shopping malls technically American, as it is an American invention, idea, culture.
@@mariacheebandidos7183 'American ones' In that most American malls are surrounded in seas of car-parks, have no public transit access and often only seen out in the suburbs these aren't good things btw
I’m always a little surprised when I see the central coast on TH-cam. It’s a strange feeling to see the places you grew up in and know from the back of you hand displayed online! I grew up in Arroyo Grande, and would always go to SLO or Santa Maria. I do agree that the mall in Santa Maria is pretty depressing, I always preferred SLO, just because the way shops and streets were sooo much more cozy and aesthetically pleasing. But hey, the mall at Santa Maria gave me a really nice jacket for $10, so not all things are bad haha
Japan also has large downtown malls, most of them centuries-old companies that modernized and expanded during the reconstruction boom after the 1923 earthquake, and most have become institutions in their own, like Aeon, Isetan, and Mitsukoshi in Tokyo and Hankyu in Osaka. They get that foot traffic boost by deliberately connecting their stores to intercity and subway rail stations, as well as to bus terminals. This is the concept of eki-naka being replicated all over by these companies.
Japan also has quite a few of these milan style enclosed shopping streets (not as fancy but same idea eg. Kyoto part of Sanjo dori and surrounding streets, part of the streets surrounding Ishibashi handai mae station in Toyonaka Osaka),
At least quite a few of Japanese downtown malls face more 'outwards', with windows/escalators facing towards the street. Getting to the top of one and seeing the views is quite nice! But that necessitates active street life (as you said). Can't imagine the excitement of watching empty streets from Santa Maria's mall. :)
When I was a kid, we had a downtown shopping area in Detroit called Trappers Alley repurposed from a series of old fur trading warehouses. The buildings were connected by a series of skywalks to avoid having to cross a street. Most of the stores were inside except for the ground level stores that only had access from the street. It was pretty cool and fun. It doesn't exist anymore as it was replaced with a casino.
Actually the Galleria it is a shopping mall built like that from the ground up with the dome in the late 19th century. They destroid a large part of the medioval alleys and raplace with the galleria and via Dante that connect piazza del Duomo with piazza castello. There are some other gallerias in Milan downtown but they are declining because they aren't in the primary touristic spot as the bigger one And I think that is hard to compare American sprawled cities whit the dense Europen ones.
Hi there! Santa Maria Native here :) I do have to agree, our downtown is lacking for the size of SM. Compared to cities like San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara(which are not too far from SM) have such great downtowns! It's always nice seeing my town in videos whether the attention is good or bad lol.
Block 37 is a better example of a downtown mall from Chicago, connected to a train station and accessible at street and underground via a pedestrian walkway
Block 37 is definitely one of the greatest disasters/missed-opportunities in Chicago's history in terms of urban development right up thee with Wolf Point.
I agree with you there Block 37 is another example that could've been brought up. Much of State Street in the loop of the mag mile would've been good examples to based on his criteria.
Here in Vancouver, where our suburbs all have their own downtowns, the trend seems to be outdoor-style malls attached to SkyTrain (metro) stations at each suburb's downtowns. My office is at one of them (built around 2018), and my suburb is building two by the mid-2020s, and 2 other ones are nearing completion. And there are even more coming.
Those suburban centres, like Surrey Central Metrotown and Brentwood, are still suburban malls for automobiles. Those suburban centres all have a lot of free parking for customers and are not connected so well with adjacent neighbourhoods. The different thing is that, all those suburban centres are well connected with skytrain and buses.
@@seanshen8325 The new Brentwood seems to be shifting though. No free parking anymore and it's shifting towards a pedestrian-plaza type of strategy. Kind of like Marine Gateway (which I'd argue is the earliest modern incarnation of this new strategy) but much larger in scope.
@@buckyhermit Transit use is still way too low in Vancouver, car is still king. Take a bus, you hardly see any professional people, it’s mostly young people and seniors. That’s why traffic gets worse and worse in the city.
You are completely right about Santa Maria’s mall being depressing lol. A majority of locals here don’t shop at the mall but instead drive 30+ min to SLO or all the way to Camarillo outlets
Calgary's Core Mall does this well in my opinion. Its tied into the train system, has no above-ground parkade, and it designed to fit around the streets. If you go in street level its only a little space the size of a block with stores that want to be street facing but if you go up the escalator then you suddenly have a couple stories of uninterrupted walking space. This lets the mall be big without cutting off cross traffic who need to navigate around downtown. No big parkades, no monolithic walls of concrete.
I immediately thought of Core as well with all the street stuff (including C Train and Plus 15) at the front door. A far cry from Pacific Centre in Vancouver, complete with a dud pedestrian mall.
One typology that might not be that common in the US is transit-integrated malls. These are usually centred in and around major railway- and metro stations and have seamless indoor connections to both stations and (at least usually) good connection to the surrounding urban fabric. Indoor malls in general aren't inherently good or bad, they're just slightly outdated these days. In the right context and with good design even a fairly traditional mall can play well in an urban setting.
I actually think these transit-integrated malls are not that uncommon in the US, at least in large cities with transit networks. Seattle's Westlake Center is an example I can think of off the top of my head, Denver's Union Station to a lesser extent.
Here in Buffalo we have the architecturally drab Main Place Mall that was built in the late 60s and is now shuttered today even the food court is closed. We have a transit mall on Main Street that killed downtown in the 80s and now they are trying to replace it with a combined cars and surface light rail sharing the street. So far the results haven’t been the greatest.
Good comment and that's actually what I was just thinking about in my own city's main downtown shopping mall - Melbourne Central in Melbourne, Australia. It occupies a block that has trams on 3 of the 4 surrounding roads, and is built on top of a metro station. So the entrances and exits to the station provide access to the shopping mall, and the interior walkways of the mall itself are a way to walk between city blocks, so designed for walking through between city blocks or accessing public transport rather than a "park & shop" experience. It's also underneath a 51-storey office tower so between a metro station, 3-storey shopping mall that also works as pedestrian access between city blocks, and 51-storey office tower, it's certainly a very effective use of space.
I like it when malls attempt to integrate into the city centre rather than shut it out, such as the Galleria like you mentioned. It's also great when they can repurpose existing buildings and upgrade them. A couple of examples I quite like in the UK are the redevelopment of Bracknell town centre and Gunwharf Keys in Portsmouth. They both have a bit of an inside-outside feel and are like pedestrian streets with some cover over them to keep the rain out. The line between the mall and the rest of the city/town is quite blurred.
Perhaps you might not like it as much if the integration included a scattering of used needles and public defecations along with mass shoplifting. This is what the "fortress" model is shutting out..... I used to live near one of these fancy outdoor pedestrian malls and it is now too dangerous for families to bring their children for a day of shopping and dining. That's the thing with public streets....everyone gets to occupy them and you can't ask them to leave even if they are screaming profanities and pissing everywhere before chasing you down the walkway.
@@searose6192 I don't believe there's a direct correlation between the kind of development I'm talking about and the destiny you describe. There's got to be other factors going on there as I've seen many successful examples of these "outdoor malls" that have been doing well for decades.
@@mdhazeldine There are absolutely other factors. Unfortunately the overlap between those other factors and political interest in these sorts of city planning ideas is near 100% , meaning it is very hard to get one without the other in the US.
@@searose6192 Obviously if the city or town the outdoor mall is in is as much of a shithole as you describe, the outdoor mall would be the same. That problem would not lie with the mall itself as it would the place as a whole. And places like that are certainly in the minority.
Lots of malls are dyeing, large anchors store have left like Sears, JC Pennies. Stores like Target and Walmart have taken business away from malls. Than on line shopping from Amazon and other online stores have also taken business away.
I used to live in Sacramento and now live in SLO so I feel like I can always relate to your examples haha. Santa Maria is pretty depressing. I work like less than a block from that pedestrian mall you filmed at in slo haha, it’s a nice mix of new and old. Lots of historic buildings
Where I am from in Germany we have these mixed use streets, where in some places cars are allowed or at least semi allowed for like people who live there, but they have to drive at 8km/h max. "Verkehrsberhigte Zone" "Calm-Traffic-Zone" Which means, you can drive through there, but there are only limited parking spaces, so most of the time you park 1km or so away. I am there every few months when I am visiting my parents, but the city I am living in has one too. A bunch of kebab, pizza, Ice-cafe and other local food places just 1 minute apart by foot. But also some chain drugstores around a corner, pharmacies, hairdressers and barbers. A bunch of butchers and local bakeries, local schoolsupplies stores, the postal office and some stores which offer to take your packages of other postal services. I love to take my time there and visit the kebab place and a barber there very regularly. A jeweler, 2 boutiques, a shisha store and probably a bunch of other stuff I missed are also there. Add to that the city hall, the police station and the local court. Just some minutes away from there is a small group of different doctors who share a building, a bio-supermarket. There are also stores for glasses, hearing aids, and a bunch of other things. Also, just some minutes of walking away is a big open space in front of the courthouse where 2 times a week where local farmers sell their produces. From veggies to fresh meat and cheese you can get everything. It is also used by kids on the other days for skateboarding and driving their bikes and doing tricks. And on special occasion it can be used for events, which didn't happen as much since the whole pandemic thing. Right near it is a playground with in ground trampolines for kids. And also some small local tech stores, even more pharmacies, there are at least 4 I know of, all within like 5 minutes of each other. Even more restaurants and places to get food to go, some more "luxurious" dinning places and so on. It also looks like you would imagine a old German town. I just can't imagine not having everything I need within walking distance after getting out of my car.
one correction about Milan Galleria. It was not built upon previously existent buildings, but it was a sort of 1800 shopping mall that replace a whole city block at the time. Of curse now there are new shops, but it is still city-owned and renovation could be kind of limited. That is one of the reasons why Apple didn't open a store there. One another great example of an old shopping mall is the Vulturul Negru in Oradea (Romania)
A possible way to benefit the downtown local businesses while also having the draw of the mall, is to have old malls (dead ones especially) or downtown malls filled with local businesses. Or at least be required to have a few.
You showed my city at 5:06! Market Square is almost completely empty in the shopping areas now, but I think Conestoga College might take up more of the space which could bring more people to the downtown, and GoodLife Fitness is there as well. Downtown Kitchener was on the decline from the 1990$ to early 2000s, but has improved significantly over the past 10 years! We even got an LRT line going through Kitchener-Waterloo (Waterloo, the city you cited is one of the tri-cities) and they're looking to expand it to Cambridge (the third tricity) by 2032!
I think there is a good chance Conestoga College will take up the whole building, Trios College is moving the call center has moved, and GoodLife fitness and The Record closed recently.
Woah! It is! I love that square in Kitchener. The LRT and TNT change is car focus to pedestrian focus is why I love the KW area. However, there is still sprawling urban areas. Especially in South Waterloo.
Fairview Park Mall in Kitchener is making some good changes. Fitting into the local and historic design of Kitchener. As well building office space, more outside facing retail and residential towers on useless parking lots.
"The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands" is a modern galleria. It connects the gardens by the bay to the laser show in the harbour and it's absolutely thriving. My nearest big city, Leeds UK, has several historic arcades which are thriving, and several fortress style downtown malls which are in decline. The most recent malls have been designed in an arcade style with street frontage around the outside too. I think you'd find Leeds a fascinating city to study. It's the largest European city without any mass transit and yet it still has a relatively walkable city centre. I love your videos and watch them on nebula 🍻
Finally someone else from Leeds!! I agree, the city centre is sorta a series of shopping centres these days. I can get what I needed but if I want something from a local business I have to go away from the shopping centres. Kirkgate market is pretty nice for locals shops. The bathrooms could use a lot of works tho. The lack of public transit when we use to be at the forefront of Trams technology is infuriating. That and lots of places lack train stations when we have lines through our community or near by. If they'd just put the money in Leeds could be so much better.
@@tsareric1921 I just posted something about the arcades, then noticed this thread. Leeds always was a mecca for shopping, and the Mecca was a mecca for a paedophile.
I think a lot of the reason why Leeds is so walkable is because of the Inner Ring Road. A lotta urbanist types hate urban motorways but Leeds is an example where it does the job it was supposed to do - funnel traffic away from the city centre while keeping it accessible
The owner Las Vegas Sands is reportedly putting The Shoppes for sale though, which might mean that it hasn't been found to be profitable enough. Running along its length is a man-made canal (modeled after Venice I guess) with a pretty expensive boat ride service (~S$14-16/trip). What's even more interesting is that as the Shoppes sits along the coastline of downtown Singapore's Marina Bay, there's an underwater passageway connecting The Shoppes to Apple's store that's built in a pavilion a short distance offshore in the bay iteslf
In Rockville Maryland, they built a downtown mall in the early 1970s. They had torn down their venerable, vernacular downtown. The new mall was DOA at its opening with only a handful of local area stores including a local chain department store that closed only a few years later after that whole chain closed. The mall was built like a concrete fortress with a parking garage. They tried to revitalize the mall in the 1980s to no avail. Finally the mall was torn down in 1995 in favor of new development as it never reached its full potential.
I think you forgot one reason so many towns built downtown malls - cost (to the town), In regular streets, the town is responsable for cleaning, maintenance, garbage collection etc. By allowing huge malls to be built, the town turns this cost over to the developer, and in addition collects taxes for the entire built surface of the mall - not just the shops. Love your videos :)
The Arndale centres in the UK are a great example of how unsuccessful in the centre shopping malls are in the long run, the only successful one had to be bombed by the IRA to work (Manchester Arndale that is). One in Bolton (called Crompton place) is to be demolished very soon, as it really effected foot traffic flow as it blocked access to the other side of the town centre. In the UK malls there are more shops on the exterior and more chance people will go out into the wider area, it's just the footfall overall hadn't increased, therefore not helping the town.
Milton Keynes is odd, there are two massive shopping centres right next to each other, each full of chain stores, no local businesses. It didn’t seem like walking to and from them was considered much as it’s surrounded by car parks and big roads. That said I don’t think there’s anywhere to walk to - looking at a map there doesn’t seem to be a high street or town centre at all like you’d find in most other towns here, it’s almost like the shopping centres are the town centre. Everything seems to be on such a big scale there, it’s very different from other towns.
@@jordan8995 yeah being a planned town from nothing it doesn't have that base of shops and with the present thinking for urban design at the time big shopping malls, unfortunately you end up with that and no space for independent retailers.
the bull ring in birmingham seems like a success but thats because it ties in so well with new street station and the main shopping street (new street)
Very interesting video. Note that Santa Maria is a prime example of a terrible mall as opposed to two surrounding cities with more successful inner cities malls: Santa Barbara and the mentioned San Luis Obispo. In Northern California Walnut Creek integrated a downtown mall beautifully 40 years ago while Santa Rosa constructed a horrible walled mall that totally detracts from the downtown at about the same time. The key is the successful integration of the mall's design with the historic city scape.
Vancouver's downtown mall (Pacific Center) is built primarily 1 level below street level and stretches 2 blocks through the busiest part of downtown. It ends up connecting Robson Street to Granville Station and I think works well complimenting the street-level retail.
Pacific Centre is nice from what I remember; loved the Nordstrom. Here in Toronto we have the Eaton Centre which is similar in many aspects as the mall only has one retail level that's not underground.
The development of Pacific Centre is one of the biggest travesties in Vancouver urban development. Any planner today with contemporary ideas would agree. It happened in the 60s when the city expropriated properties of landowners in a huge city block , the heart of downtown, to build Eatons(now Nordstrom) , and the mall and office towers. Much of these were historic buildings before. Today, that area has its life sucked out of it. From an urban design perspective, the fact that you have a mall and ugly office towers next to a train station seems irrelevant. In North America it’s just that bad that having a transit hub next to a mall sounds like a win.
Maybe I'm naive, but for small cities with small downtowns you could put the parking not directly under or next to the mall but a few blocks away. People would then have to walk through downtown streets to get to the mall. This wold work even better if these downtown streets were car free.
Why would you build your parking blocks away from your store? If the city government requires it, why wouldn’t you just move your project to the next town over?
A bit off the beaten path, but visiting Sofia, Bulgaria, we saw both a pedestrianized street (Vitosha Blvd) which had lots of small business and major chain (mostly European brands) retail and restaurants (they put their smoking “sections” in separate structures out in what used to be the street) and then taking a kind of old tram farther away from the historic part of town (protected buildings galore) the was the Bulgaria Mall, a newer style mall that was actually doing a lot of business (we visited in early December, so the middle of the Christmas shopping season).
In downtown Winnipeg Portage Place shopping centre covers three city blocks. It failed to attract any suburban shoppers and became a hangout for residents from the inner city. Two theatres and some stores closed down and were converted to office space. Meanwhile the Forks market (also in downtown) used to be part of a rail yard and is a thriving business that attracts people from all over the city.
Basically, every city planner needs to read Strong Towns.... I'm actually surprised at this point that City Beautiful hasn't yet collaborated with Strong Towns or Not Just Bikes. Any interest @City Beautiful?
I love these types of "outdoor" malls like San Louis Obispo because the just look really nice and feel more like a bunch of seperate stores unlike the giant fortress style malls that feel like their only purpose is to make people consume as much as possible while spending the least on an actual enjoyable experience.
The Gallery in Baltimore has gone downhill so much… They just redeveloped it to remove a floor of retail and it’s still struggling to fill with tenants. We need retail on the actual street, not hidden inside a building.
Miami has 2 good examples of "downtown malls". One shown in the video that's literally in Downtown, Bayside Marketplace and then there's Brickell City Center, maybe 10 minutes down the road in Brickell. Brickell isn't technically downtown but most people consider it to all be part of the Miami "core". Brickell City Center a mix between a suburban mall and as its open air but also has multiple stories, escalators and elevators and private parking structures. But because its open air and no walls that block it off from the city streets, you can easily go from Brickell City Center stores to walk across the street to local restaurants without much problem. I would put Brickell City Center somewhere in between the Festival Marketplace and the San Luis Obispo examples.
@@scpatl4now Yeah its called CocoWalk but it was torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. It was under construction for so long people lost interest in going there because many stores closed for construction and because of the mess from the rebuild. They also timed the relaunch it at the worst time possible because the construction ended right as the pandemic kicked off so it died before it was even alive. I haven't been in a while because it really doesn't offer anything different than what I can get at Bayfront, Brickell, Lincoln Road (Miami Beach) and the Shops at Midtown Miami, Design District etc. Its honestly just become a redundant mall and cant compete with the ones I just listed. Bayfront is where you go for super cheap/low-quality tourist trap shops and loud music with cheap drinks. Brickell City Center is for upscale/upper middle class stores like the Apple Store, Elie Tahari, Sacks Fifth Ave, Ted Baker, Zara + a movie theater Lincoln Road is basically Brickell City Center but for those on Miami Beach Shops at Midtown is the middle-class/outlet mall where you find shops like Nordstroms Rack (Outlet), Target, Ross, Marshalls, Guess Factory (Outlet) Design District is for the millionaire's row shops like Tiffanys, Burberry, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Tom Ford, Bottega, Hermes etc. CocoWalk offers a Chase bank, a chain barbershop (The Spot), FP Movement (apparently they sell sports clothes?), Bluemercury skincare...
WTP is a monster on Michigan Ave but the entire street from the bridge to Oak Street Beach acts as one continuous shopping street. There used to be more vertical malls but it is actually very, very cohesive as shopping destinations go.
Yes I agree as someone whose by the Water Tower Place often on Fridays at the moment The WTP is just one of the edges for what's south of there is the mag mile. I personally count WTP as separate from the Mag Mile, but it's just north of there. So I agree with you it's still a cohesive shopping destination. City Beautiful portrays it as if it's just a stand alone. I don't personally agree with this. It's also accessible by CTA bus and train. There's a CTA bus that drops you off right in front of WTP and the Chicago red station is the closest to WTP with the Chicago Brown station being the second closest. The area also has a bunch of hotels where visitors can walk within blocks to WTP and other spots. There are some local business around, but sadly some of them are gone cause of covid lockdowns. One of the places that closed, can't remember if it was due to covid or was not Pippin's bar & tavern not that far away from WTP. It was, far as I know, the only dive looking bar in that whole area, I loved the look inside it had the only Chicago look. Black & white pictures of old Chicago on the walls. There was a hot dog joint that was co-owned that's now a Devil Dawgs, good place to, but I miss both of the them. The former hot dog joint could bring food over to the tavern as well. City Beautiful should come visit Chicago and experience the area as whole. The way he portrays it to me is a narrowed perception. Some of the things he mentions does not apply to the area around WTP. I'd be more concerned about crime followed by affordability for some shoppers rather than about the design of WTP.
Riverpark Square in Spokane is a success story, it's blended pretty well with the streets. But wow, it was a boondoggle to get built, they spent more on lawyers than builders.
Have you read Cities: Back from the Edge? I found it at a used book shop coincidentally as I was strolling the old town square of Bentonville, AR. This video reminded me of the contents I've read from it so far.
Interesting video! I keep seeing ads to visit the Santa Maria area as a less expensive alternative to staying closer to the ocean. I want to live on the Central Coast, but it's expensive, so I've looked a little at the more inland areas like Santa Maria. This is very helpful. Thank you! And yay for SLO!
Santa Maria, CA… “affordable” bedroom community to San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara. There is no downtown there… town seems like a large suburb. Take a look at San Diego’s Horton Plaza. It is being gutted, opened to the community and most square footage is going to high tech office space.
In my town we have a main shopping street (pedestrian only street) with two malls.. the malls aren't big, maybe 10-20 stores. They feel more like a extention of the street, rather then a place you drive to to shop.
My all time favorite was Crossroads Plaza in Salt Lake City. Was always a highlight of visiting downtown SLC in the 80's & 90's. Sadly, Google says it closed in 2007.
You showed Liberty Place in Philly as a bad example, but didn't mention the Fashion District a few blocks east which opened a couple of years ago, which is much more integrated into downtown, with a regional rail station and subway station right in it to allow people from all over the city to easily take transit in, as well as skyway connections to the convention center and and underground connection to Reading Terminal Market, which was (pre-covid) a huge bustling place to eat or do some grocery shopping. It's much more integrated into the surrounding environment. It's also better connected to the street level around it with many of the shops on the ground level having connections both inward on the air conditioned side and toward the street, making casual entry to say visit a Sephora or a Starbucks by someone walking along the sidewalk much easier.
@@Jay-ho9io I personally don't. To me, the bare concrete surface looks both boring and kind of "dirty". IMHO the surface should be at least painted. I googled the college you mentioned and I indeed didn't like how the surface looked even though the shape of the building was interesting. But everyone has a different taste.
Rochester, New York used to have a downtown mall, called Midtown Plaza. It was the epitome of the concept discussed here. It no longer exists, but once held the big “anchor” stores of the past, a spacious food court, and a beautiful atrium with an intricate clock tower and even a little monorail!
Mall where I used to live did that but they were so expensive that they were gobbled up by real estate investors so now no one lives there :/ :\ Although that's just what happened with most of the new construction.
Santa Maria in the house! Paseo Nuevo in Santa Barbara was an example of trying to integrate better, but well....sorta. La Cumbre Plaza, the whole 1963 vibe of flight. Nice video. Where are you based?
Idk where he got Fanooey but I generally don't blame anyone for pronouncing any Massachusetts locations incorrectly. We do just kinda screw around with extra and misplaced letters.
Water Tower Place may not look like much from the street, but it has a huge, multi-tiered lobby with fountains that acts as respite from the crowds filling the sidewalks of Michigan Avenue. I also like Block 37 on State Street because it connects to the subway and Chicago's pedway system.
Yes I agree Water Tower Place may not look like much on the outside, but it's well put together on the inside including it's food court. Their food court isn't chain restaurants they also have their own food stations with different kinds of food. I just wish it wasn't so pricy sometimes. But I love checking out all the different food courts. lol. However what City Beautiful doesn't mention is there's multiple shops and restaurants around the Water Tower Place. The Mag Mile is just south of The Water Tower place. There's also the John Hancock skyscraper right next to The Water Tower which some of its own shops and restaurants as well as the observation deck. There's also an art museum within walking distance of WTP to. Funny enough there's a shopping area in Chicago that has a resemblance to what he's describing at 6:39. It's in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. There's a small one way street shopping corridor with shops and restaurants lining up and down it. There's an archway on each side with "Lincoln Square" written above it. I also agree on Block 37 it's cool that it's tied to the Pedway and state street station as well.
Wow, this was so interesting. As a sociology minor this sounded very interesting to me. I will definitly researach more about the topics you talked about! :O
@@TommyTom21 not at all haha. but alot of cityplanners study either geography (wich is like 50% sociology), environmental stuff or sociology. its nice to know how cultures and people with different income interact with each other. many sociologists have a bit of politics in uni to know how to use that sociological analysis and do something with it. but cityplanners know about how to have impact not with politics but to know what to build somewhere and how. very cool stuff :D
Some urban malls work in mixed-use format. There are offices, so workers can dine and shop within the mall. Residences are there, with occupants when the offices are closed. Otherwise the complex is just idle 10 to 12 hours a day, which wastes resources.
I was in Milan last week, for the first time in my life. It's overpriced, so I spent most of my time in a restaurant and a book store, but it is a beautiful space.
There's an outdoor mall area in Freeport, Maine that sort of bridges the gap between local and national, where it extends from L.L. Bean's flagship store into the downtown. L.L. Bean is sort of local and national in this setting, and inside the mall area are a bunch of national outlet stores, but the mall itself is surrounded by the natural downtown full of local restaurants and shops.
Yep. Both the Eaton Centre and Square One have become dowtowns, transit hubs, and tourist destinations. Add the fact that Canada’s climate helps keep most malls alive.
Eaton's pretty unique though, it's pretty much a pedestrian bypass of Yonge between Dundas and Queen (fixes the "inward facing" issue), adjoined on both ends by subway stations and streetcars, and doesn't have the mega-anchor tenant discussed. Plus, the sheer size of our downtown puts most American cities to shame, meaning it's a much smaller part of the urban fabric. Square One is a decent mall, but its location in the middle of the new downtown is a bit flawed with how huge the parking lots and footprint is.
In Montevideo, Uruguay we have several of these, they usually only have a positive effect on the adjacent line of blocks with businesses that don't fit inside the mall because they're full, after which there's a ring of dead blocks, save for a few restaurants and less appropriate stuff like lingerie stores nearby
But imo the biggest downside of a specific one near the urban centre is that beside killing business in the last few blocks of our main Ave, it also killed galleries all over the centre itself
When properly incorporated, downtown malls are awesome. My favorite one I've visited was the Galeria Krakowska in Krakow, Poland. It combined all the best elements of American and European shopping centers, and was super well integrated with both the historic area of the city and the train station.
Yeah Shopping malls in Poland tend to be accesible for people walking by or coming in public transport, and that is a huge factor in making it succesful.
Really helpful in understanding the macro + micro factors shaping the cities, but in US only. One thing I do try to consider though, factors like weather do have some impact in the way some other cities are built.
I was going to post a more positive example, but from what I've gleaned, that particular mall is not doing well right now. I suspect the pandemic is a major cause, though not necessarily the only major cause. The mall in question is Circle Centre, in downtown Indianapolis. And for a long time it actually did fairly well since its opening in 1995. A few factors contributed to this: 1) *It was in the downtown of a large city.* This was a factor listed in the video and is simply not something that can be ignored. Thing was, the downtown of Indianapolis wasn't the most vibrant place at the time; the city was called "Naptown" for a reason. Due to other factors listed below, Circle Centre was able to make downtown Indy into a destination. 2) *It integrated itself into the existing landscape.* Rather than a concrete and steel exterior, it decorated its facade liberally with brick. This is a common facade material in a lot of buildings in the locale, and even newer major buildings tend to use it (see also: Bankers Life Fieldhouse; Lucas Oil Stadium). Further, it made use of a number of existing buildings, including the old flagship store for locally-based L.S. Ayres. One other thing it did was that it did not disrupt the existing traffic grid; the two halves of the mall are connected by a two-story skywalk. Even the parking tried to do this; the western parking garage has a number of restaurants built into it on the ground floor. 3) *Rather than isolating itself, it tried to connect itself to other parts of downtown.* A number of the restaurants associated with the mall have outdoor *and* indoor entrances. Also, the mall connected to other major buildings in the area (some of which had their own small shopping centers) via skywalks, including many hotels. It also connected itself to the nearby Indiana Convention Center in this way, which gave attendees an easy and obvious shopping destination. Indeed, the mall includes a fine arts space called the Artsgarden, which is suspended above a major street intersection. The Artsgarden has four connecting skywalks: one to the main body of the mall, and three others to nearby hotels (two of which have their own auxiliary shopping centers). Now, the problems. 1) *The closing of the anchor stores.* In 2011, Nordstrom closed, leaving the space vacant. Simon Property Group, who administers the mall, looked for a new buyer for some time, but eventually converted the store into office space for the local newspaper (The Indianapolis Star). The mall remained in decent health even after that, with the remaining store spaces continuing to operate at capacity (or close to it), mostly due to factor *3* above. However, the other anchor, Carson Pirie Scott, closed in 2018 due to Bon-Ton's bankruptcy, and that space currently sits vacant. I can't imagine that did any favors for the health of the mall. _(I will say that my experience with the mall is limited after the year 2011 due to me moving out of state, but when I last visited in 2015, the mall seemed to be doing relatively OK. My knowledge of the mall's fortunes between that last visit and now is limited, so please let me know how things went with them after that.)_ 2) *COVID-19.* This, I suspect, was the real killer, or the killing blow if the first problem was more serious than I realized. Circle Centre was constantly taking advantage of a good position in the middle of downtown, connected to a number of hotels as well as the nearby convention center. This, however, meant that the mall was heavily reliant on convention-goers, vacationers, business travelers, and (for the food courts and some shops) local office workers for its income. Well, when COVID-19 hit, travel hit an all-time low, which brought the number of leisure travelers down significantly (and in-person conventions like Gen Con? Forget it). And with offices closed and people working remotely, business travelers and most office workers didn't have an incentive to go there either. I don't have the attendance numbers handy, but I would suspect a sharp downturn in 2020's second quarter, and no real recovery since. From what I hear, the mall is dying, with maybe 1 in 3 stores open now, and it's not in the best of shape. Sad, really.
The Nordstrom there was the only one in Indianapolis for over 10 years. In fact Nordstrom had contacted not to build another for a certain amount of time. However when they finally built the north suburban one that signed the death notice for the downtown store since the customer base was north suburban.
In São Paulo, we have the Shopping Light. They converted the big fancy office building that housed the headquarters of the Canadian electricity company Light into a beautiful shopping mall. I'm not sure if even has a parking lot (and if they do, it must be hell expensive), because I always got there by subway or by walking from somewhere downtown I had already been to.
I’m from SM, but it wasn’t dead, just had and has a lot of issues with the wrong kinds of development. That mall was and is a tragedy though😂😂 its still the weirdest mall Ive ever been in because all the anchor businesses pretty much collapsed
I never liked the design of Water Tower Place (3:54). When I go shopping in that neighborhood, I would sometimes accidentally skip that building because I keep thinking it's a large factory, LOL.
Arlington, VA has a nice use of the outdoor mall concept you talk about around 7 minutes in. Pentagon City, Clarendon, AND Ballston all do this to great success.
In my home city in Austria downtown mals never were a proplem. I often used the parkingspace of the male to park my car while shopping on the adjacent pedestrian street. The video title confused me at first because they never seemed like a proplem to me.
I live in Brisbane and we have the Queen Street Mall which is a pedestrian mall next to King George Square, QSM is connected to so many CBD shopping malls that are ALL successful.
Well that’s what the new urbanization/gentrification movement in most major cities in the US has been trying to accomplish for the past 20yrs to a certain point. City bike programs is one example
@Kambing101 yeah. I wish we had some light rail systems here in Chicago. We are in need for some modernization of our old heavy rail system , although it does have its benefits.
Man, US is the only country built like that. You have downtown and outskirts where nothing happens. In Europe, there is nothing like that. It's good cheap public transport or a cycle to any place.
Buena Vista mall in Mexico City is a very interesting place. The bottom floor is a train station. The mall is gigantic and full of shoppers. It's not a downtown mall, but it's in the middle of a very densely populated neighborhood near the city center. I think the design is good.
I nominate Santa Rosa, CA. The city planners decided not only to build a highway through downtown to get drivers to pull off and shop Downtown. They built a huge downtown mall that acts as a wall between downtown and the highway. Garages on the highway side (originally with free parking, now paid) to get drivers to park away from downtown. This is definitely a fortress mall. It's a giant red brick wall. The funny thing is despite the downtown struggles, the mall seems to be declining fast enough that the mall may soon be more empty then downtown which is relatively strong.
Because (until the end of the last century) people loved indoor malls because you could buy everything under one air-conditioned roof, and then have dinner and see a movie before leaving. Even people in city centers loved that kind of convenience. Of course, older people are going back to mom-and-pop shops, and young people buy everything online (including groceries), so malls are failing now.
hey, former resident of santa maria and current resident of san luis obispo here! funny to see my local area on this channel. “slo” has done a lot of cool things with their downtown with a lot of walkability and many local stores w/ only a few chain stores. meanwhile i’ve never realized my whole life that there even is a “downtown” in santa maria and that the mall is that. it’s definitely a depressing concrete moat in santa maria that has seen better days. unfortunately for santa maria, it is a much poorer city than san luis obispo, due in part by the lackluster downtown and general urban sprawl it has which would provide less local tax revenue. they would likely struggle to make the funds for a downtown revitalization project to replicate something like slo. hopefully something will turn it around and make a nice downtown one day for santa maria!
Not to mention wages in santa maria are pretty bad while cost of living is still very high. Also from Santa Maria btw! I remember learning in highschool we were the second most expensive place to live in the country for median income to cost of living. But also, they did have the money for a revitalization but they spent it all developing the old agricultural land just north of Betteravia into a bunch more suburban style shopping centers. Hopefully their development path takes a turn from the suburban style to something more dense
I think there are other examples around the country, but White Plains, New York feels like it has more shopping malls than store fronts. Its a wild car-dependent suburban city that attracts shoppers from greater New York metro area who don’t feel like going into NYC for shopping. I think it’d be an interesting case study to do a video about. There is a pretty heavily utilized bus system and some streets with small businesses, but it’s complicated.
3:41 this is the economic theory of circulation of money. This was the reason for the success of "black wallstreet" as $1 would stay in the community for a year circulating 19 times, whereas although we can't get exact accurate figures now on average a $1 stays in an African American community for 6 hours, due to national chains.
You can have both fortress and town style if you down size. In Hong Kong, there is a relatively new mall call the Forest. It is small, about one block with only one residential tower above it. It is situated in an older but popular neighborhood and all of its ground level stores faces the street. There is a small walk way that separate an auxiliary building. The four floor interior is not blocky and feels very organic in its layout. Unlike even other fortress style malls in the city, this mall is too small to have a transport hub inside it and very little public parking, so people have to walk to it from the subway and bus stops a street over, forcing people to walk past local shops and restaurants. The mall features a few brands that are harder to find and boast some organic and health food stores that is also rare, so shoppers going to these stores will walk past street level shops that aren't part of this mall.
Love how you called out Kitchener and Waterloo for their downtown malls - as a longtime Waterloo region-based subscriber it's good to see you sharing the lessons we've learned. But you missed something - Kitchener used to have two downtown malls, since one wasn't enough.
Square One in Mississauga, Ontario seems to be doing well. It's an important transit hub for the city, featuring bus terminals for both local transit and intercity GO buses. It's also conveniently located right next to city hall, Central Library, the Living Arts Center and Celebration Square. And it does a pretty good job of keeping up with public interest. A few years ago they opened a new annex called the Food District, featuring a number of small restaurants and cafes, a few boutique shops like a tea shop and a fresh seafood market, and a community kitchen which used to run weekly classes and workshops before the pandemic.
When you say downtown mall thats not what i think of, I think of a mall thats a few floors of a tall building where the other floors serve other functions. That mall in Santa Maria is just what i'd call a standard mall which is depressing.
I’ve been to some crap malls in my time but the mall in my town is pretty successful, it’s architecture is Edwardian but the only logical time for it to be built is the 50s and 60s, and it’s still a fixture of my town, it’s quite well designed, there’s tiered car parks on the sides which fit enough cars without taking up loads of space and it looks great from the outside and is filled with lots of shops with nice AC inside, and I think it does help people come further into the downtown, there’s 4 pedestrian exits to the mall which are convenient and easy to find, two of them lead out to pavements along roads, one of which is full of shops alongside and the other two lead out into a park and a pedestrian only shopping area, it’s a large path that leads down the hill with shops on each side that go down to more pedestrian parks to the main shopping area which has seating areas, a fountain, and shops all around it. It’s a good system and people are always waking around these paths and visiting the shops. Of course, there are less good places, down in the back of the shopping area there’s some very run down areas surrounded with smoke stained brutalist buildings and some ugly old restaurants. It’s not great looking, but there are good shops there and it’s definitely not usually empty or anything. Our town is not perfect, we have a lot of chain establishments and fast food restaurants while the local businesses aren’t the most successful but they do live on, both in the pedestrianised shopping areas, historic high street, and in the numerous local parades between housing estates which is where they are most successful, our local one has only one or two chain places, a Best One and a Coral, all the rest is local to our area and I’ve never seen anywhere else, it’s same for the next closest parade, theirs is slightly bigger and has a few chain shops but it’s still mostly unique local businesses.
@@kylehill3643 ah yes the people who have no problem if the global population dropped to 500k see these sickos only want the bare minimum of people to produce shit for the elites and they don't need 7.6 billion people to do that more people = harder to manage
Most cities in Europe above a certain critical size have a pedestrian shopping area in or near the center. They seem to work pretty well. They're at least pleasent to walk around, especially when they maintain most of the historical buildings in the area.
Interesting. In European cities, these malls are popping up like crazy, to the point where former shopping streets are transforming into streets lined with small indoor-malls. I guess the major differences are that they are always located right next to transit stops (especially renovated train stations) and that they usually have office spaces on top of them. I'm not sure if that's important for the neighborhood character though. People do complain that they force local stores out of business, but I guess from a pure efficiency perspective centralizing shops next to well frequented transit stops is a good idea. I feel like between transit-accessible downtown malls and exclusively shopping online I still prefer malls, despite their lack of local businesses.
I was thinking about this recently because I realized so many cities have failing shopping malls like Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and there is a sort of mall that is really empty in SLC it makes sense that car dependent malls wouldn't work in a city core
I’m from Indianapolis and can vouch that Circle Centre Mall in our downtown is essentially dead except for a large H&M. The end began in 2011 when Nordstrom (entire city block, three stories) pulled out. It was very hard to fill that large of a space. The city newspaper eventually took over the second & third floors - but now newspapers are in decline. Restaurants took over the first floor. Domino effect of store closures accelerated after Carson, Pirie, Scott went under a few years back. Then pandemic hit. Lost stores that had been there since the mall opened in 1995. Was a very glamorous, upscale place for 16 years.
@UCmmH-HbXIa4AnmhGmWXQdrQ the one in nj is like super crowded and full all the time but like ok you can make your opinions while never even visiting it dumbass
Once again, US city planners should learn from us in Singapore. Construct your towns with public infrastructure, government services, commercial shops and residential houses integrated together into a single cohesive block. So that everything is self sustaining rather than spread out.
Here in Porto Alegre we don't really have suburban malls, the lack of zoning for one thing helped us avoid forming desolate suburbs, but multiple times when people built malls in the edge of town, the city would eventually encompass it as it grew and the malls made it highly valuable land
![[DRIP] ‘BILLIONAIRE’ PREVIEW](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/m0eXQD0gIeE/mqdefault.jpg)
If you look at many Japanese cities, there are covered shopping streets that shelter shoppers from the weather while keeping the original buildings.
I loved the outlying shopping streets in Osaka, but the mall at Umedas intimidating. A fortress indeed.
th-cam.com/video/n0XlOrhnHQg/w-d-xo.html Koenji in Tokyo is my favorite example of this
Yeah they are all over Japanese cities
You see this a lot in European city centres too, often the malls are "hidden in plain sight" many of them using the facades of existing buildings ( but vast open malls inside, meaning they knocked down the internals and built a mall inside, basically. And often they're transit hubs, serving other roles such as bus stations, metro stations, regular rail stations, etc. So the end result is a lot of people visiting them without a car.
@@Glenni91N yup, Leadenhall market is a great one. More of an arcade than a mall, but definitely closer to the original definition of mall than the america shopping bunk things. Tokyo had a few great ones when I was there, too. All the character of a major shopping street with the shelter and enclosure of an arcade
I've been to that mall in the beginning. Couldn't even find it for 10 minutes because the outside is unmarked, windows blacked out; it looks borderline abandoned. On the plus side, it has an awesome retro game store inside :)
That game store! They sell all kinds of stuff and will repair your consoles too! Theyre a solid plaxe
Was able to buy me a Gameboy advanced from there a few years back. The only thing good in that mall is the movie theater though. Idk if Santa Maria has a downtown anyway lol
The best retro game stores are always in rundown malls. The best one I've seen was in Brunswick GA. Completely insane the selection they had.
The Queen Victoria Building in Sydney, Australia is a good example of the festival marketplace! When I lived there I loved that they converted so many older buildings into these community spaces because it kept the character and history of the buildings. Also like you’d said there not sterile at all. I loved it. Totally different from Las Vegas where I live now, unfortunately
Yeah, both the Queen Victoria and the George St Mall are nice ways of getting those big retail centres without absolutely killing nearby areas, but I do vastly prefer the Queen Victoria. Still, they are great for a "downtown mall".
Yep, and can you believe they were going to demolish it to build a multi-story car park?
do you take meds for your adhd, milady?
I thought Queen Vic is in Melbourne?
Better examples for Sydney would be Pell St and Haymarket?
The Queen Victoria Building (usually called the QVB) is in Sydney. The Queen Victoria Market is in Melbourne.
I would love to see a video on Toronto's underground PATH system. Not sure what other cities have similar systems, but it connects the downtown core by a network of shopping and dining areas. It allows for extensive pedestrian travel under the city, separate from cars and its transit connected. Bonus for providing a sheltered route between buildings during the winter. Sadly almost all the shops remain closed because of the pandemic and the rise of work from home.
Montreal and Houston both have similar underground path systems.
Spokane, Washington has an extensive skywalk network
Halifax, Montreal, Regina, Calgary and Edmonton have a similar system. There are also similar systems across Japan.
Like others have said, there are similar systems in Canada, but the PATH during its peak was amazing, and the buildings were still very slowly trying to add programming during evenings and weekends. If COVID didn't happen possibly by mid 2020s the PATH would be open more on Saturdays and evenings. Canadian pedestrian systems vs how it is in many american cities are fortunately better and are in the right direction. Not as intense as Asia, but on the right path.
Sounds dangerous imo
Montreal does this very well. Department stores, chains, and local busines all thrive in separate buildings that are all connected by a massive underground city. It's a great hybrid use of space that's particularly brilliant when you consider the snow and the cold. You can navigate a huge chunk of the city completly underground or at worst pop out from an entrance 20 feet from where you need to be and only need to navigate one snowbank.
Montreal does everything well; you get what you pay for! Also, Toronto has a similar system called the PATH.
That was by far my favorite thing about Montreal when I visited 17 years ago.
I'm not sure why people think these downtown malls in Montreal are a good thing. Eaton's and Simpson's and Ogilvy's are all gone. As with Toronto's PATH, they take life from the street. Ever go by the Faubourg on a Sunday morning? Depressing.
I am from Santa Maria and I can confirm that mall is wack. By the time I graduated highschool a number of years ago, it was actually dominated by a number of sports facilities like a skatepark, batting cages, dance studios, martial arts facilities, and others. It was wild. I love seeing my hometown in your video!
Ayyy im from paso🤙🏽
@@leo50perez yoooo I’m from Templeton
Don't forget the skating rink for a while too.
Same. Rip Motionz
@@TheFastStealth lol. I know you. This is Jacob. I was best friends with your brother Alexander in elementary school
In Toronto, we have the huge Eaton Centre mall. It’s a modern mall that’s interconnected with a myriad of transit options. Subway, two streetcar lines, underground PATH, etc.
Eaton Centre is a great downtown mall example
Sounds like the distillery district is a good example of a festival marketplace as well.
I think it works even more because it is in a major city, not a mid-sized one where the downtown doesn't have as many people.
100km west of Toronto is my hometown, Brantford. Downtown mall killed any retail left downtown, then the mall died it's own death. These days, urban renewal is driven by a University campus. A creative solution, that camnuse both historic buildings (eg. city library building became the main building of campus), and newer buildings (eg. small movie theatre became a lecture hall)
One of the negatives about downtown malls does also seem to ring true for Eaton's, though: the shops along Yonge Street next to the mall really seem to struggle since the mall foot traffic rarely goes to them
Sounds like I'll need to finally visit Boston to learn how to pronounce Faneuil Hall. Though I am partial to my own creative interpretation!
As @symhwind pointed out. I'd suggest looking into the Prudential/Copley Mall Back Bay area as a better example of a Mall within a city. The Prudential Mall and Copley Mall are connected via a walking bridge and link directly into Public transit on both the Orange Line and Green Line trains. its also in the middle of both business and residential areas as ts across the street from Newbury St. which is a big shopping/restaurant/residential area. Both malls support the Back Bay and South End residential areas, which are pretty dense with people living there.
Fan yuhl hall
They have a lot of lovely food there I live close by.
FAN-you-ull (rhymes with dull).
@@BWOne Agreed on Copley/Prudential. Fanooly hall is less of a mall and more of a tourist trap with mediocre food stalls.
Honestly you make city planning sounds really intriguing. I never thought much about the design of a city
Neither did the people designing them, for a long time.
@@Tealice1 Seriously.
@@Tealice1 fr
Good luck getting a job in city planning because it is mostly a dead field especially here in the US.
@@r.pres.4121 Why is that? Given that the majority of people live in urban areas, creating vibrant, flourishing, uplifting, and picturesque urban cores makes a lot of sense. I live in Middelburg, the Netherlands, and its town centre exudes charm and delight.
This isn't just in the US, in the UK too. And now the malls are going out of business thanks to the internet with all the anchor stores leaving.
Wrong. You're talking about malls that merely sell products.
@@sociolocomtsac ...... as opposed to malls that buy products? Or don't have any products at all? Are those even really malls?
@@jh-wq5qn They could be referring to malls that offer nice experiences. There is a mall near me that I could walk to with a lot of privately owned small restraints, a stage where local musicians some time come to play, a library with free to use computers, a large chess board and pieces where people can play or watch people play chess, a game shop that lets you freely try out games and a grocery store in case you quickly need to buy one or two things for dinner. It's even right next to the park. I go there some times just to hang out and it's fairly popular. That's the kind of mall I think we should have more of because it's like a community center.
What infuriates me, is that a lot of the UK ones( even more extreme in Germany) were build when decline was already happening in US. Should have learned from their failures...
Blame Amazon.
recently went to Westfield Stratford, in Stratford, London
it’s a hugggggge mall in east London but was designed to be easily accessible by public transport and connects easily to the queen Elizebeth Olympic Park and downtown Stratford.
nowadays most people arrive by train and use the surrounding park!
Westfield Stratford is a lot better, than Westfield white city. White city one is far too large for comfortable walking. Once you're in you'll have to walk for years to get back to public transport.
Yes Westfield Stratford follows the idea of many large malls in East Asia, especially Tokyo and Shanghai. They are quite transit-oriented, have lots of openings to street, fit inside blocks, and does not have sprawling surface parking lots. I personally prefer this type of shopping malls than American ones.
I've been there, in fact I even bought my previous phone there, but I'd still prefer a traditional shopping street. Malls are really sterile and you can't really hang out there without buying anything. They kill local shops without bringing any real benefits to anyone other than big corporations.
@@eastpavilion-er6081 "American ones"?
all types of shopping malls exist in America, built to meet specific regional or city needs.
and aren't all shopping malls technically American, as it is an American invention, idea, culture.
@@mariacheebandidos7183 'American ones' In that most American malls are surrounded in seas of car-parks, have no public transit access and often only seen out in the suburbs
these aren't good things btw
I’m always a little surprised when I see the central coast on TH-cam. It’s a strange feeling to see the places you grew up in and know from the back of you hand displayed online! I grew up in Arroyo Grande, and would always go to SLO or Santa Maria. I do agree that the mall in Santa Maria is pretty depressing, I always preferred SLO, just because the way shops and streets were sooo much more cozy and aesthetically pleasing. But hey, the mall at Santa Maria gave me a really nice jacket for $10, so not all things are bad haha
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Where's the link to fill it out?
We need a link mate
Japan also has large downtown malls, most of them centuries-old companies that modernized and expanded during the reconstruction boom after the 1923 earthquake, and most have become institutions in their own, like Aeon, Isetan, and Mitsukoshi in Tokyo and Hankyu in Osaka.
They get that foot traffic boost by deliberately connecting their stores to intercity and subway rail stations, as well as to bus terminals. This is the concept of eki-naka being replicated all over by these companies.
Their shotengai never lose foot traffic even with malls being built, most probably due to their reliance on public transport.
Japan also has quite a few of these milan style enclosed shopping streets (not as fancy but same idea eg. Kyoto part of Sanjo dori and surrounding streets, part of the streets surrounding Ishibashi handai mae station in Toyonaka Osaka),
At least quite a few of Japanese downtown malls face more 'outwards', with windows/escalators facing towards the street. Getting to the top of one and seeing the views is quite nice! But that necessitates active street life (as you said). Can't imagine the excitement of watching empty streets from Santa Maria's mall. :)
When I was a kid, we had a downtown shopping area in Detroit called Trappers Alley repurposed from a series of old fur trading warehouses. The buildings were connected by a series of skywalks to avoid having to cross a street. Most of the stores were inside except for the ground level stores that only had access from the street. It was pretty cool and fun. It doesn't exist anymore as it was replaced with a casino.
That sounds really neat. Shame it failed.
Actually the Galleria it is a shopping mall built like that from the ground up with the dome in the late 19th century. They destroid a large part of the medioval alleys and raplace with the galleria and via Dante that connect piazza del Duomo with piazza castello.
There are some other gallerias in Milan downtown but they are declining because they aren't in the primary touristic spot as the bigger one
And I think that is hard to compare American sprawled cities whit the dense Europen ones.
Hi there! Santa Maria Native here :) I do have to agree, our downtown is lacking for the size of SM. Compared to cities like San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara(which are not too far from SM) have such great downtowns! It's always nice seeing my town in videos whether the attention is good or bad lol.
Block 37 is a better example of a downtown mall from Chicago, connected to a train station and accessible at street and underground via a pedestrian walkway
the superior transfer between red and blue lines tbh. anything to avoid the jackson piss tunnel
Love hanging out at block 37 before seeing a show over at the oriental.
@@Dolphinhi2 ditto…you’d think the CTA would construct some sort of ventilation in that tunnel!
Block 37 is definitely one of the greatest disasters/missed-opportunities in Chicago's history in terms of urban development right up thee with Wolf Point.
I agree with you there Block 37 is another example that could've been brought up. Much of State Street in the loop of the mag mile would've been good examples to based on his criteria.
Here in Vancouver, where our suburbs all have their own downtowns, the trend seems to be outdoor-style malls attached to SkyTrain (metro) stations at each suburb's downtowns. My office is at one of them (built around 2018), and my suburb is building two by the mid-2020s, and 2 other ones are nearing completion. And there are even more coming.
that and high streets, stacking a suburb on top of an outdoor mall.
Those suburban centres, like Surrey Central Metrotown and Brentwood, are still suburban malls for automobiles. Those suburban centres all have a lot of free parking for customers and are not connected so well with adjacent neighbourhoods. The different thing is that, all those suburban centres are well connected with skytrain and buses.
@@seanshen8325 The new Brentwood seems to be shifting though. No free parking anymore and it's shifting towards a pedestrian-plaza type of strategy. Kind of like Marine Gateway (which I'd argue is the earliest modern incarnation of this new strategy) but much larger in scope.
@@buckyhermit Marine gateway is still a mess for traffic though. Fine if you just take the train for the shopping but bad for pedestrians
@@buckyhermit Transit use is still way too low in Vancouver, car is still king. Take a bus, you hardly see any professional people, it’s mostly young people and seniors. That’s why traffic gets worse and worse in the city.
You are completely right about Santa Maria’s mall being depressing lol. A majority of locals here don’t shop at the mall but instead drive 30+ min to SLO or all the way to Camarillo outlets
The Ferry Building in San Francisco is a really nice festival market
Calgary's Core Mall does this well in my opinion. Its tied into the train system, has no above-ground parkade, and it designed to fit around the streets. If you go in street level its only a little space the size of a block with stores that want to be street facing but if you go up the escalator then you suddenly have a couple stories of uninterrupted walking space. This lets the mall be big without cutting off cross traffic who need to navigate around downtown. No big parkades, no monolithic walls of concrete.
Same with Toronto's Eaton Centre.
I immediately thought of Core as well with all the street stuff (including C Train and Plus 15) at the front door. A far cry from Pacific Centre in Vancouver, complete with a dud pedestrian mall.
@@marsgal42 The area around Pacific Centre is terrible, it’s the core of downtown but the ambience is horrible.
One typology that might not be that common in the US is transit-integrated malls. These are usually centred in and around major railway- and metro stations and have seamless indoor connections to both stations and (at least usually) good connection to the surrounding urban fabric.
Indoor malls in general aren't inherently good or bad, they're just slightly outdated these days. In the right context and with good design even a fairly traditional mall can play well in an urban setting.
I actually think these transit-integrated malls are not that uncommon in the US, at least in large cities with transit networks. Seattle's Westlake Center is an example I can think of off the top of my head, Denver's Union Station to a lesser extent.
Here in Buffalo we have the architecturally drab Main Place Mall that was built in the late 60s and is now shuttered today even the food court is closed. We have a transit mall on Main Street that killed downtown in the 80s and now they are trying to replace it with a combined cars and surface light rail sharing the street. So far the results haven’t been the greatest.
In Singapore quite a lot of new suburban shopping malls are built above/below bus interchanges to save space, often with condominiums above them also
Good comment and that's actually what I was just thinking about in my own city's main downtown shopping mall - Melbourne Central in Melbourne, Australia. It occupies a block that has trams on 3 of the 4 surrounding roads, and is built on top of a metro station. So the entrances and exits to the station provide access to the shopping mall, and the interior walkways of the mall itself are a way to walk between city blocks, so designed for walking through between city blocks or accessing public transport rather than a "park & shop" experience. It's also underneath a 51-storey office tower so between a metro station, 3-storey shopping mall that also works as pedestrian access between city blocks, and 51-storey office tower, it's certainly a very effective use of space.
I like it when malls attempt to integrate into the city centre rather than shut it out, such as the Galleria like you mentioned. It's also great when they can repurpose existing buildings and upgrade them. A couple of examples I quite like in the UK are the redevelopment of Bracknell town centre and Gunwharf Keys in Portsmouth. They both have a bit of an inside-outside feel and are like pedestrian streets with some cover over them to keep the rain out. The line between the mall and the rest of the city/town is quite blurred.
Perhaps you might not like it as much if the integration included a scattering of used needles and public defecations along with mass shoplifting. This is what the "fortress" model is shutting out.....
I used to live near one of these fancy outdoor pedestrian malls and it is now too dangerous for families to bring their children for a day of shopping and dining. That's the thing with public streets....everyone gets to occupy them and you can't ask them to leave even if they are screaming profanities and pissing everywhere before chasing you down the walkway.
@@searose6192 I don't believe there's a direct correlation between the kind of development I'm talking about and the destiny you describe. There's got to be other factors going on there as I've seen many successful examples of these "outdoor malls" that have been doing well for decades.
@@mdhazeldine There are absolutely other factors. Unfortunately the overlap between those other factors and political interest in these sorts of city planning ideas is near 100% , meaning it is very hard to get one without the other in the US.
@@searose6192 Obviously if the city or town the outdoor mall is in is as much of a shithole as you describe, the outdoor mall would be the same. That problem would not lie with the mall itself as it would the place as a whole. And places like that are certainly in the minority.
If you don't fix your city planning, having one outside mall won't bring you anything
Lots of malls are dyeing, large anchors store have left like Sears, JC Pennies. Stores like Target and Walmart have taken business away from malls. Than on line shopping from Amazon and other online stores have also taken business away.
I used to live in Sacramento and now live in SLO so I feel like I can always relate to your examples haha. Santa Maria is pretty depressing.
I work like less than a block from that pedestrian mall you filmed at in slo haha, it’s a nice mix of new and old. Lots of historic buildings
As a San Luis Obispo resident our downtown is one of the most consistently busy downtowns I have seen
Where I am from in Germany we have these mixed use streets, where in some places cars are allowed or at least semi allowed for like people who live there, but they have to drive at 8km/h max. "Verkehrsberhigte Zone" "Calm-Traffic-Zone" Which means, you can drive through there, but there are only limited parking spaces, so most of the time you park 1km or so away.
I am there every few months when I am visiting my parents, but the city I am living in has one too. A bunch of kebab, pizza, Ice-cafe and other local food places just 1 minute apart by foot. But also some chain drugstores around a corner, pharmacies, hairdressers and barbers. A bunch of butchers and local bakeries, local schoolsupplies stores, the postal office and some stores which offer to take your packages of other postal services.
I love to take my time there and visit the kebab place and a barber there very regularly.
A jeweler, 2 boutiques, a shisha store and probably a bunch of other stuff I missed are also there. Add to that the city hall, the police station and the local court. Just some minutes away from there is a small group of different doctors who share a building, a bio-supermarket.
There are also stores for glasses, hearing aids, and a bunch of other things.
Also, just some minutes of walking away is a big open space in front of the courthouse where 2 times a week where local farmers sell their produces. From veggies to fresh meat and cheese you can get everything. It is also used by kids on the other days for skateboarding and driving their bikes and doing tricks. And on special occasion it can be used for events, which didn't happen as much since the whole pandemic thing. Right near it is a playground with in ground trampolines for kids. And also some small local tech stores, even more pharmacies, there are at least 4 I know of, all within like 5 minutes of each other. Even more restaurants and places to get food to go, some more "luxurious" dinning places and so on.
It also looks like you would imagine a old German town.
I just can't imagine not having everything I need within walking distance after getting out of my car.
shopping malls are basically just places where car drivers get to walk
NJB? Is that you?
Lmao car drivers
In Japan though, they're connected directly to railway stations.
@@champanzee6486 o think its him lol
@@TheStarswearee Because both are one-sided and have a shitty mind-set.
one correction about Milan Galleria. It was not built upon previously existent buildings, but it was a sort of 1800 shopping mall that replace a whole city block at the time.
Of curse now there are new shops, but it is still city-owned and renovation could be kind of limited. That is one of the reasons why Apple didn't open a store there.
One another great example of an old shopping mall is the Vulturul Negru in Oradea (Romania)
Apple still opened a store in the city center and the galleria, in piazza Liberty
A possible way to benefit the downtown local businesses while also having the draw of the mall, is to have old malls (dead ones especially) or downtown malls filled with local businesses. Or at least be required to have a few.
You showed my city at 5:06! Market Square is almost completely empty in the shopping areas now, but I think Conestoga College might take up more of the space which could bring more people to the downtown, and GoodLife Fitness is there as well. Downtown Kitchener was on the decline from the 1990$ to early 2000s, but has improved significantly over the past 10 years! We even got an LRT line going through Kitchener-Waterloo (Waterloo, the city you cited is one of the tri-cities) and they're looking to expand it to Cambridge (the third tricity) by 2032!
I’m thinking the study may be a bit old, not sure which one it is. Last time I went to MS in 2019 it was looking rough
I think there is a good chance Conestoga College will take up the whole building, Trios College is moving the call center has moved, and GoodLife fitness and The Record closed recently.
Woah! It is! I love that square in Kitchener. The LRT and TNT change is car focus to pedestrian focus is why I love the KW area. However, there is still sprawling urban areas. Especially in South Waterloo.
Fairview Park Mall in Kitchener is making some good changes. Fitting into the local and historic design of Kitchener. As well building office space, more outside facing retail and residential towers on useless parking lots.
@@pbilk Yeah I really hope that area densifies more. It has a lot of potential especially with it's public transit access.
"The Shoppes at Marina Bay Sands" is a modern galleria. It connects the gardens by the bay to the laser show in the harbour and it's absolutely thriving. My nearest big city, Leeds UK, has several historic arcades which are thriving, and several fortress style downtown malls which are in decline. The most recent malls have been designed in an arcade style with street frontage around the outside too. I think you'd find Leeds a fascinating city to study. It's the largest European city without any mass transit and yet it still has a relatively walkable city centre. I love your videos and watch them on nebula 🍻
Finally someone else from Leeds!! I agree, the city centre is sorta a series of shopping centres these days. I can get what I needed but if I want something from a local business I have to go away from the shopping centres.
Kirkgate market is pretty nice for locals shops. The bathrooms could use a lot of works tho.
The lack of public transit when we use to be at the forefront of Trams technology is infuriating. That and lots of places lack train stations when we have lines through our community or near by. If they'd just put the money in Leeds could be so much better.
@@tsareric1921 I just posted something about the arcades, then noticed this thread. Leeds always was a mecca for shopping, and the Mecca was a mecca for a paedophile.
I think a lot of the reason why Leeds is so walkable is because of the Inner Ring Road. A lotta urbanist types hate urban motorways but Leeds is an example where it does the job it was supposed to do - funnel traffic away from the city centre while keeping it accessible
@@Squaretable22 yea. The highway configuration is somewhat unusual.
The owner Las Vegas Sands is reportedly putting The Shoppes for sale though, which might mean that it hasn't been found to be profitable enough. Running along its length is a man-made canal (modeled after Venice I guess) with a pretty expensive boat ride service (~S$14-16/trip). What's even more interesting is that as the Shoppes sits along the coastline of downtown Singapore's Marina Bay, there's an underwater passageway connecting The Shoppes to Apple's store that's built in a pavilion a short distance offshore in the bay iteslf
In Rockville Maryland, they built a downtown mall in the early 1970s. They had torn down their venerable, vernacular downtown. The new mall was DOA at its opening with only a handful of local area stores including a local chain department store that closed only a few years later after that whole chain closed. The mall was built like a concrete fortress with a parking garage. They tried to revitalize the mall in the 1980s to no avail. Finally the mall was torn down in 1995 in favor of new development as it never reached its full potential.
I think you forgot one reason so many towns built downtown malls - cost (to the town), In regular streets, the town is responsable for cleaning, maintenance, garbage collection etc. By allowing huge malls to be built, the town turns this cost over to the developer, and in addition collects taxes for the entire built surface of the mall - not just the shops.
Love your videos :)
The Arndale centres in the UK are a great example of how unsuccessful in the centre shopping malls are in the long run, the only successful one had to be bombed by the IRA to work (Manchester Arndale that is). One in Bolton (called Crompton place) is to be demolished very soon, as it really effected foot traffic flow as it blocked access to the other side of the town centre. In the UK malls there are more shops on the exterior and more chance people will go out into the wider area, it's just the footfall overall hadn't increased, therefore not helping the town.
Milton Keynes is odd, there are two massive shopping centres right next to each other, each full of chain stores, no local businesses. It didn’t seem like walking to and from them was considered much as it’s surrounded by car parks and big roads. That said I don’t think there’s anywhere to walk to - looking at a map there doesn’t seem to be a high street or town centre at all like you’d find in most other towns here, it’s almost like the shopping centres are the town centre.
Everything seems to be on such a big scale there, it’s very different from other towns.
@@jordan8995 yeah being a planned town from nothing it doesn't have that base of shops and with the present thinking for urban design at the time big shopping malls, unfortunately you end up with that and no space for independent retailers.
the bull ring in birmingham seems like a success but thats because it ties in so well with new street station and the main shopping street (new street)
As someone born and raised in Santa Maria, I found myself nodding in agreement more than a couple times.
Very interesting video. Note that Santa Maria is a prime example of a terrible mall as opposed to two surrounding cities with more successful inner cities malls: Santa Barbara and the mentioned San Luis Obispo. In Northern California Walnut Creek integrated a downtown mall beautifully 40 years ago while Santa Rosa constructed a horrible walled mall that totally detracts from the downtown at about the same time. The key is the successful integration of the mall's design with the historic city scape.
Vancouver's downtown mall (Pacific Center) is built primarily 1 level below street level and stretches 2 blocks through the busiest part of downtown. It ends up connecting Robson Street to Granville Station and I think works well complimenting the street-level retail.
Pacific Centre is nice from what I remember; loved the Nordstrom. Here in Toronto we have the Eaton Centre which is similar in many aspects as the mall only has one retail level that's not underground.
Isn't it also connected to the SkyTrain? It's been a hot minute since I've been to BC so I forget
@@StoneWeevil at the north end via The Bay, yes. Its an odd underground connection.
The development of Pacific Centre is one of the biggest travesties in Vancouver urban development. Any planner today with contemporary ideas would agree. It happened in the 60s when the city expropriated properties of landowners in a huge city block , the heart of downtown, to build Eatons(now Nordstrom) , and the mall and office towers. Much of these were historic buildings before.
Today, that area has its life sucked out of it.
From an urban design perspective, the fact that you have a mall and ugly office towers next to a train station seems irrelevant.
In North America it’s just that bad that having a transit hub next to a mall sounds like a win.
Maybe I'm naive, but for small cities with small downtowns you could put the parking not directly under or next to the mall but a few blocks away. People would then have to walk through downtown streets to get to the mall. This wold work even better if these downtown streets were car free.
Americans struggle with concept of walking.
Why would you build your parking blocks away from your store? If the city government requires it, why wouldn’t you just move your project to the next town over?
@@donkeysaurusrex7881 Because the town next over might already have a downtown mall.
@@ymi_yugy3133 Not in a small city. There isn’t enough business to support it.
Bad idea, the mall will turn into ghost town
A bit off the beaten path, but visiting Sofia, Bulgaria, we saw both a pedestrianized street (Vitosha Blvd) which had lots of small business and major chain (mostly European brands) retail and restaurants (they put their smoking “sections” in separate structures out in what used to be the street) and then taking a kind of old tram farther away from the historic part of town (protected buildings galore) the was the Bulgaria Mall, a newer style mall that was actually doing a lot of business (we visited in early December, so the middle of the Christmas shopping season).
In downtown Winnipeg Portage Place shopping centre covers three city blocks. It failed to attract any suburban shoppers and became a hangout for residents from the inner city. Two theatres and some stores closed down and were converted to office space. Meanwhile the Forks market (also in downtown) used to be part of a rail yard and is a thriving business that attracts people from all over the city.
Basically, every city planner needs to read Strong Towns.... I'm actually surprised at this point that City Beautiful hasn't yet collaborated with Strong Towns or Not Just Bikes. Any interest @City Beautiful?
I love these types of "outdoor" malls like San Louis Obispo because the just look really nice and feel more like a bunch of seperate stores unlike the giant fortress style malls that feel like their only purpose is to make people consume as much as possible while spending the least on an actual enjoyable experience.
The Gallery in Baltimore has gone downhill so much… They just redeveloped it to remove a floor of retail and it’s still struggling to fill with tenants. We need retail on the actual street, not hidden inside a building.
Miami has 2 good examples of "downtown malls". One shown in the video that's literally in Downtown, Bayside Marketplace and then there's Brickell City Center, maybe 10 minutes down the road in Brickell. Brickell isn't technically downtown but most people consider it to all be part of the Miami "core". Brickell City Center a mix between a suburban mall and as its open air but also has multiple stories, escalators and elevators and private parking structures. But because its open air and no walls that block it off from the city streets, you can easily go from Brickell City Center stores to walk across the street to local restaurants without much problem. I would put Brickell City Center somewhere in between the Festival Marketplace and the San Luis Obispo examples.
It has been a long time since I was in Miami but I recall Coconut Grove being something similar, but again...that was a long time ago.
@@scpatl4now Yeah its called CocoWalk but it was torn down and rebuilt from the ground up. It was under construction for so long people lost interest in going there because many stores closed for construction and because of the mess from the rebuild. They also timed the relaunch it at the worst time possible because the construction ended right as the pandemic kicked off so it died before it was even alive. I haven't been in a while because it really doesn't offer anything different than what I can get at Bayfront, Brickell, Lincoln Road (Miami Beach) and the Shops at Midtown Miami, Design District etc. Its honestly just become a redundant mall and cant compete with the ones I just listed.
Bayfront is where you go for super cheap/low-quality tourist trap shops and loud music with cheap drinks.
Brickell City Center is for upscale/upper middle class stores like the Apple Store, Elie Tahari, Sacks Fifth Ave, Ted Baker, Zara + a movie theater
Lincoln Road is basically Brickell City Center but for those on Miami Beach
Shops at Midtown is the middle-class/outlet mall where you find shops like Nordstroms Rack (Outlet), Target, Ross, Marshalls, Guess Factory (Outlet)
Design District is for the millionaire's row shops like Tiffanys, Burberry, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Tom Ford, Bottega, Hermes etc.
CocoWalk offers a Chase bank, a chain barbershop (The Spot), FP Movement (apparently they sell sports clothes?), Bluemercury skincare...
WTP is a monster on Michigan Ave but the entire street from the bridge to Oak Street Beach acts as one continuous shopping street. There used to be more vertical malls but it is actually very, very cohesive as shopping destinations go.
Agreed. It blends in quite nicely with the surroundings. From my experience, shoppers will visit WTP as well as the entire Michigan Ave
Yes I agree as someone whose by the Water Tower Place often on Fridays at the moment The WTP is just one of the edges for what's south of there is the mag mile. I personally count WTP as separate from the Mag Mile, but it's just north of there. So I agree with you it's still a cohesive shopping destination. City Beautiful portrays it as if it's just a stand alone. I don't personally agree with this. It's also accessible by CTA bus and train. There's a CTA bus that drops you off right in front of WTP and the Chicago red station is the closest to WTP with the Chicago Brown station being the second closest. The area also has a bunch of hotels where visitors can walk within blocks to WTP and other spots. There are some local business around, but sadly some of them are gone cause of covid lockdowns. One of the places that closed, can't remember if it was due to covid or was not Pippin's bar & tavern not that far away from WTP. It was, far as I know, the only dive looking bar in that whole area, I loved the look inside it had the only Chicago look. Black & white pictures of old Chicago on the walls. There was a hot dog joint that was co-owned that's now a Devil Dawgs, good place to, but I miss both of the them. The former hot dog joint could bring food over to the tavern as well. City Beautiful should come visit Chicago and experience the area as whole. The way he portrays it to me is a narrowed perception. Some of the things he mentions does not apply to the area around WTP. I'd be more concerned about crime followed by affordability for some shoppers rather than about the design of WTP.
Riverpark Square in Spokane is a success story, it's blended pretty well with the streets. But wow, it was a boondoggle to get built, they spent more on lawyers than builders.
Have you read Cities: Back from the Edge? I found it at a used book shop coincidentally as I was strolling the old town square of Bentonville, AR. This video reminded me of the contents I've read from it so far.
Interesting video! I keep seeing ads to visit the Santa Maria area as a less expensive alternative to staying closer to the ocean. I want to live on the Central Coast, but it's expensive, so I've looked a little at the more inland areas like Santa Maria. This is very helpful. Thank you! And yay for SLO!
Santa Maria, CA… “affordable” bedroom community to San Luis Obispo and Santa Barbara. There is no downtown there… town seems like a large suburb. Take a look at San Diego’s Horton Plaza. It is being gutted, opened to the community and most square footage is going to high tech office space.
I grew up there . It was great at one point :( I’ll miss the outdoor ice skating
In my town we have a main shopping street (pedestrian only street) with two malls.. the malls aren't big, maybe 10-20 stores. They feel more like a extention of the street, rather then a place you drive to to shop.
My all time favorite was Crossroads Plaza in Salt Lake City. Was always a highlight of visiting downtown SLC in the 80's & 90's. Sadly, Google says it closed in 2007.
It was replaced by the City Creek Center, which is actually similar in concept to the Galleria in Milan.
You showed Liberty Place in Philly as a bad example, but didn't mention the Fashion District a few blocks east which opened a couple of years ago, which is much more integrated into downtown, with a regional rail station and subway station right in it to allow people from all over the city to easily take transit in, as well as skyway connections to the convention center and and underground connection to Reading Terminal Market, which was (pre-covid) a huge bustling place to eat or do some grocery shopping. It's much more integrated into the surrounding environment. It's also better connected to the street level around it with many of the shops on the ground level having connections both inward on the air conditioned side and toward the street, making casual entry to say visit a Sephora or a Starbucks by someone walking along the sidewalk much easier.
6:13 "Blank concrete surfaces aren't appealing to anyone."
Brutalist architects might disagree.
So would gang-bangers and graffiti artists, and their disagreement is more visible.
I love brutalism. Miami-Dade community College (now Miami University) is a wonderful example, at their Kendall campus.
@@Jay-ho9io I personally don't. To me,
the bare concrete surface looks both boring and kind of "dirty". IMHO the surface should be at least painted.
I googled the college you mentioned and I indeed didn't like how the surface looked even though the shape of the building was interesting.
But everyone has a different taste.
At least brutalism has windows or downspouts every once in awhile
Brutalist architects are disconnected with reality or what the people want.
They only live in their echo chambers.
Rochester, New York used to have a downtown mall, called Midtown Plaza. It was the epitome of the concept discussed here.
It no longer exists, but once held the big “anchor” stores of the past, a spacious food court, and a beautiful atrium with an intricate clock tower and even a little monorail!
How to plan out a good shoppping centre: put flats on top. The requirements that make a place inhabitable also make it more pleasant to visit.
I don't understand why more malls don't do this.
Mall where I used to live did that but they were so expensive that they were gobbled up by real estate investors so now no one lives there :/ :\ Although that's just what happened with most of the new construction.
Amen. Schools too. Make the mall its own tiny community.
Exactly like asia
Santa Maria in the house! Paseo Nuevo in Santa Barbara was an example of trying to integrate better, but well....sorta. La Cumbre Plaza, the whole 1963 vibe of flight. Nice video. Where are you based?
I know he didnt just say Faneuil Hall “Fanooey”
Came here to say that lol
I had to rewind twice to be sure that's what happened. I hurt a little.
Thats how we gotta pronounce it from now on
Phooey to Fanooey!
Idk where he got Fanooey but I generally don't blame anyone for pronouncing any Massachusetts locations incorrectly. We do just kinda screw around with extra and misplaced letters.
Water Tower Place may not look like much from the street, but it has a huge, multi-tiered lobby with fountains that acts as respite from the crowds filling the sidewalks of Michigan Avenue. I also like Block 37 on State Street because it connects to the subway and Chicago's pedway system.
Yes I agree Water Tower Place may not look like much on the outside, but it's well put together on the inside including it's food court. Their food court isn't chain restaurants they also have their own food stations with different kinds of food. I just wish it wasn't so pricy sometimes. But I love checking out all the different food courts. lol. However what City Beautiful doesn't mention is there's multiple shops and restaurants around the Water Tower Place. The Mag Mile is just south of The Water Tower place. There's also the John Hancock skyscraper right next to The Water Tower which some of its own shops and restaurants as well as the observation deck. There's also an art museum within walking distance of WTP to.
Funny enough there's a shopping area in Chicago that has a resemblance to what he's describing at 6:39. It's in the Lincoln Square neighborhood. There's a small one way street shopping corridor with shops and restaurants lining up and down it. There's an archway on each side with "Lincoln Square" written above it.
I also agree on Block 37 it's cool that it's tied to the Pedway and state street station as well.
Wow, this was so interesting. As a sociology minor this sounded very interesting to me. I will definitly researach more about the topics you talked about! :O
Is sociology the study of downtown malls?
@@TommyTom21 I think he talks about people not willing to see the rests of their downtown
@@TommyTom21 not at all haha. but alot of cityplanners study either geography (wich is like 50% sociology), environmental stuff or sociology. its nice to know how cultures and people with different income interact with each other. many sociologists have a bit of politics in uni to know how to use that sociological analysis and do something with it. but cityplanners know about how to have impact not with politics but to know what to build somewhere and how. very cool stuff :D
@@TommyTom21 there is urban sociology, good morning
@@lenas6246 I just woke up and read this comment LOL
Some urban malls work in mixed-use format. There are offices, so workers can dine and shop within the mall. Residences are there, with occupants when the offices are closed. Otherwise the complex is just idle 10 to 12 hours a day, which wastes resources.
I was in Milan last week, for the first time in my life. It's overpriced, so I spent most of my time in a restaurant and a book store, but it is a beautiful space.
There's an outdoor mall area in Freeport, Maine that sort of bridges the gap between local and national, where it extends from L.L. Bean's flagship store into the downtown. L.L. Bean is sort of local and national in this setting, and inside the mall area are a bunch of national outlet stores, but the mall itself is surrounded by the natural downtown full of local restaurants and shops.
Eaton Centre in downtown Toronto is thiriving.
Meanwhile, Mississauga, ON built their downtown around a shopping mall (Square One)
Yep. Both the Eaton Centre and Square One have become dowtowns, transit hubs, and tourist destinations. Add the fact that Canada’s climate helps keep most malls alive.
Eaton's pretty unique though, it's pretty much a pedestrian bypass of Yonge between Dundas and Queen (fixes the "inward facing" issue), adjoined on both ends by subway stations and streetcars, and doesn't have the mega-anchor tenant discussed. Plus, the sheer size of our downtown puts most American cities to shame, meaning it's a much smaller part of the urban fabric.
Square One is a decent mall, but its location in the middle of the new downtown is a bit flawed with how huge the parking lots and footprint is.
I'm literally drinking out of a glass stolen from the eaton centre food court as we speak
In Montevideo, Uruguay we have several of these, they usually only have a positive effect on the adjacent line of blocks with businesses that don't fit inside the mall because they're full, after which there's a ring of dead blocks, save for a few restaurants and less appropriate stuff like lingerie stores nearby
But imo the biggest downside of a specific one near the urban centre is that beside killing business in the last few blocks of our main Ave, it also killed galleries all over the centre itself
He didn’t mention Houston galleria (which didn’t improve a city, but created one independent of the existing downtown)
When properly incorporated, downtown malls are awesome. My favorite one I've visited was the Galeria Krakowska in Krakow, Poland. It combined all the best elements of American and European shopping centers, and was super well integrated with both the historic area of the city and the train station.
Yeah Shopping malls in Poland tend to be accesible for people walking by or coming in public transport, and that is a huge factor in making it succesful.
Really helpful in understanding the macro + micro factors shaping the cities, but in US only. One thing I do try to consider though, factors like weather do have some impact in the way some other cities are built.
8:47 Feels nice to see SLO being mentioned
I was going to post a more positive example, but from what I've gleaned, that particular mall is not doing well right now. I suspect the pandemic is a major cause, though not necessarily the only major cause.
The mall in question is Circle Centre, in downtown Indianapolis. And for a long time it actually did fairly well since its opening in 1995. A few factors contributed to this:
1) *It was in the downtown of a large city.* This was a factor listed in the video and is simply not something that can be ignored. Thing was, the downtown of Indianapolis wasn't the most vibrant place at the time; the city was called "Naptown" for a reason. Due to other factors listed below, Circle Centre was able to make downtown Indy into a destination.
2) *It integrated itself into the existing landscape.* Rather than a concrete and steel exterior, it decorated its facade liberally with brick. This is a common facade material in a lot of buildings in the locale, and even newer major buildings tend to use it (see also: Bankers Life Fieldhouse; Lucas Oil Stadium). Further, it made use of a number of existing buildings, including the old flagship store for locally-based L.S. Ayres. One other thing it did was that it did not disrupt the existing traffic grid; the two halves of the mall are connected by a two-story skywalk. Even the parking tried to do this; the western parking garage has a number of restaurants built into it on the ground floor.
3) *Rather than isolating itself, it tried to connect itself to other parts of downtown.* A number of the restaurants associated with the mall have outdoor *and* indoor entrances. Also, the mall connected to other major buildings in the area (some of which had their own small shopping centers) via skywalks, including many hotels. It also connected itself to the nearby Indiana Convention Center in this way, which gave attendees an easy and obvious shopping destination. Indeed, the mall includes a fine arts space called the Artsgarden, which is suspended above a major street intersection. The Artsgarden has four connecting skywalks: one to the main body of the mall, and three others to nearby hotels (two of which have their own auxiliary shopping centers).
Now, the problems.
1) *The closing of the anchor stores.* In 2011, Nordstrom closed, leaving the space vacant. Simon Property Group, who administers the mall, looked for a new buyer for some time, but eventually converted the store into office space for the local newspaper (The Indianapolis Star). The mall remained in decent health even after that, with the remaining store spaces continuing to operate at capacity (or close to it), mostly due to factor *3* above. However, the other anchor, Carson Pirie Scott, closed in 2018 due to Bon-Ton's bankruptcy, and that space currently sits vacant. I can't imagine that did any favors for the health of the mall. _(I will say that my experience with the mall is limited after the year 2011 due to me moving out of state, but when I last visited in 2015, the mall seemed to be doing relatively OK. My knowledge of the mall's fortunes between that last visit and now is limited, so please let me know how things went with them after that.)_
2) *COVID-19.* This, I suspect, was the real killer, or the killing blow if the first problem was more serious than I realized. Circle Centre was constantly taking advantage of a good position in the middle of downtown, connected to a number of hotels as well as the nearby convention center. This, however, meant that the mall was heavily reliant on convention-goers, vacationers, business travelers, and (for the food courts and some shops) local office workers for its income. Well, when COVID-19 hit, travel hit an all-time low, which brought the number of leisure travelers down significantly (and in-person conventions like Gen Con? Forget it). And with offices closed and people working remotely, business travelers and most office workers didn't have an incentive to go there either. I don't have the attendance numbers handy, but I would suspect a sharp downturn in 2020's second quarter, and no real recovery since.
From what I hear, the mall is dying, with maybe 1 in 3 stores open now, and it's not in the best of shape. Sad, really.
The Nordstrom there was the only one in Indianapolis for over 10 years. In fact Nordstrom had contacted not to build another for a certain amount of time. However when they finally built the north suburban one that signed the death notice for the downtown store since the customer base was north suburban.
In São Paulo, we have the Shopping Light. They converted the big fancy office building that housed the headquarters of the Canadian electricity company Light into a beautiful shopping mall. I'm not sure if even has a parking lot (and if they do, it must be hell expensive), because I always got there by subway or by walking from somewhere downtown I had already been to.
I used to live in Lompoc, 20 mins from Santa Maria. Definitely a dead city. As was Lompoc.
I’m from SM, but it wasn’t dead, just had and has a lot of issues with the wrong kinds of development. That mall was and is a tragedy though😂😂 its still the weirdest mall Ive ever been in because all the anchor businesses pretty much collapsed
I never liked the design of Water Tower Place (3:54). When I go shopping in that neighborhood, I would sometimes accidentally skip that building because I keep thinking it's a large factory, LOL.
1:37 Holy crap, that looks dangerous! Did he actually fall down?
Arlington, VA has a nice use of the outdoor mall concept you talk about around 7 minutes in. Pentagon City, Clarendon, AND Ballston all do this to great success.
In my home city in Austria downtown mals never were a proplem. I often used the parkingspace of the male to park my car while shopping on the adjacent pedestrian street. The video title confused me at first because they never seemed like a proplem to me.
I live in Brisbane and we have the Queen Street Mall which is a pedestrian mall next to King George Square, QSM is connected to so many CBD shopping malls that are ALL successful.
Every time I watch this channel, I learn Cars Bad Pedestrians Good 😂. Really interesting stuff, I hope cities become more human oriented again.
Same
Well that’s what the new urbanization/gentrification movement in most major cities in the US has been trying to accomplish for the past 20yrs to a certain point. City bike programs is one example
@Kambing101 yeah. I wish we had some light rail systems here in Chicago. We are in need for some modernization of our old heavy rail system , although it does have its benefits.
Man, US is the only country built like that. You have downtown and outskirts where nothing happens. In Europe, there is nothing like that. It's good cheap public transport or a cycle to any place.
Buena Vista mall in Mexico City is a very interesting place. The bottom floor is a train station. The mall is gigantic and full of shoppers. It's not a downtown mall, but it's in the middle of a very densely populated neighborhood near the city center. I think the design is good.
I nominate Santa Rosa, CA. The city planners decided not only to build a highway through downtown to get drivers to pull off and shop Downtown. They built a huge downtown mall that acts as a wall between downtown and the highway. Garages on the highway side (originally with free parking, now paid) to get drivers to park away from downtown. This is definitely a fortress mall. It's a giant red brick wall. The funny thing is despite the downtown struggles, the mall seems to be declining fast enough that the mall may soon be more empty then downtown which is relatively strong.
Because (until the end of the last century) people loved indoor malls because you could buy everything under one air-conditioned roof, and then have dinner and see a movie before leaving.
Even people in city centers loved that kind of convenience.
Of course, older people are going back to mom-and-pop shops, and young people buy everything online (including groceries), so malls are failing now.
hey, former resident of santa maria and current resident of san luis obispo here! funny to see my local area on this channel. “slo” has done a lot of cool things with their downtown with a lot of walkability and many local stores w/ only a few chain stores. meanwhile i’ve never realized my whole life that there even is a “downtown” in santa maria and that the mall is that. it’s definitely a depressing concrete moat in santa maria that has seen better days. unfortunately for santa maria, it is a much poorer city than san luis obispo, due in part by the lackluster downtown and general urban sprawl it has which would provide less local tax revenue. they would likely struggle to make the funds for a downtown revitalization project to replicate something like slo. hopefully something will turn it around and make a nice downtown one day for santa maria!
Not to mention wages in santa maria are pretty bad while cost of living is still very high. Also from Santa Maria btw! I remember learning in highschool we were the second most expensive place to live in the country for median income to cost of living.
But also, they did have the money for a revitalization but they spent it all developing the old agricultural land just north of Betteravia into a bunch more suburban style shopping centers. Hopefully their development path takes a turn from the suburban style to something more dense
I think there are other examples around the country, but White Plains, New York feels like it has more shopping malls than store fronts. Its a wild car-dependent suburban city that attracts shoppers from greater New York metro area who don’t feel like going into NYC for shopping. I think it’d be an interesting case study to do a video about. There is a pretty heavily utilized bus system and some streets with small businesses, but it’s complicated.
3:41 this is the economic theory of circulation of money. This was the reason for the success of "black wallstreet" as $1 would stay in the community for a year circulating 19 times, whereas although we can't get exact accurate figures now on average a $1 stays in an African American community for 6 hours, due to national chains.
The shopping area is called Quincy Market. The public hall that is adjacent is Faneuil Hall.
Used to do everything downtown, from what dad told me. I wish we had them where I lived.
You can have both fortress and town style if you down size. In Hong Kong, there is a relatively new mall call the Forest. It is small, about one block with only one residential tower above it. It is situated in an older but popular neighborhood and all of its ground level stores faces the street. There is a small walk way that separate an auxiliary building. The four floor interior is not blocky and feels very organic in its layout. Unlike even other fortress style malls in the city, this mall is too small to have a transport hub inside it and very little public parking, so people have to walk to it from the subway and bus stops a street over, forcing people to walk past local shops and restaurants. The mall features a few brands that are harder to find and boast some organic and health food stores that is also rare, so shoppers going to these stores will walk past street level shops that aren't part of this mall.
Love how you called out Kitchener and Waterloo for their downtown malls - as a longtime Waterloo region-based subscriber it's good to see you sharing the lessons we've learned. But you missed something - Kitchener used to have two downtown malls, since one wasn't enough.
Square One in Mississauga, Ontario seems to be doing well. It's an important transit hub for the city, featuring bus terminals for both local transit and intercity GO buses. It's also conveniently located right next to city hall, Central Library, the Living Arts Center and Celebration Square. And it does a pretty good job of keeping up with public interest. A few years ago they opened a new annex called the Food District, featuring a number of small restaurants and cafes, a few boutique shops like a tea shop and a fresh seafood market, and a community kitchen which used to run weekly classes and workshops before the pandemic.
When you say downtown mall thats not what i think of, I think of a mall thats a few floors of a tall building where the other floors serve other functions. That mall in Santa Maria is just what i'd call a standard mall which is depressing.
Yea. I know of many great downtown malls thriving.
I’ve been to some crap malls in my time but the mall in my town is pretty successful, it’s architecture is Edwardian but the only logical time for it to be built is the 50s and 60s, and it’s still a fixture of my town, it’s quite well designed, there’s tiered car parks on the sides which fit enough cars without taking up loads of space and it looks great from the outside and is filled with lots of shops with nice AC inside, and I think it does help people come further into the downtown, there’s 4 pedestrian exits to the mall which are convenient and easy to find, two of them lead out to pavements along roads, one of which is full of shops alongside and the other two lead out into a park and a pedestrian only shopping area, it’s a large path that leads down the hill with shops on each side that go down to more pedestrian parks to the main shopping area which has seating areas, a fountain, and shops all around it. It’s a good system and people are always waking around these paths and visiting the shops. Of course, there are less good places, down in the back of the shopping area there’s some very run down areas surrounded with smoke stained brutalist buildings and some ugly old restaurants. It’s not great looking, but there are good shops there and it’s definitely not usually empty or anything. Our town is not perfect, we have a lot of chain establishments and fast food restaurants while the local businesses aren’t the most successful but they do live on, both in the pedestrianised shopping areas, historic high street, and in the numerous local parades between housing estates which is where they are most successful, our local one has only one or two chain places, a Best One and a Coral, all the rest is local to our area and I’ve never seen anywhere else, it’s same for the next closest parade, theirs is slightly bigger and has a few chain shops but it’s still mostly unique local businesses.
Downtown malls are one of those ideas that seemed to make perfect sense but turned out to be largely failures on a lot of levels.
No middle class = no shoppers. We keep electing people who hate the MC.
@@kylehill3643 ah yes the people who have no problem if the global population dropped to 500k see these sickos only want the bare minimum of people to produce shit for the elites and they don't need 7.6 billion people to do that more people = harder to manage
Most cities in Europe above a certain critical size have a pedestrian shopping area in or near the center. They seem to work pretty well. They're at least pleasent to walk around, especially when they maintain most of the historical buildings in the area.
Interesting. In European cities, these malls are popping up like crazy, to the point where former shopping streets are transforming into streets lined with small indoor-malls. I guess the major differences are that they are always located right next to transit stops (especially renovated train stations) and that they usually have office spaces on top of them. I'm not sure if that's important for the neighborhood character though. People do complain that they force local stores out of business, but I guess from a pure efficiency perspective centralizing shops next to well frequented transit stops is a good idea. I feel like between transit-accessible downtown malls and exclusively shopping online I still prefer malls, despite their lack of local businesses.
However malls as a whole are dying across the world.
I was thinking about this recently because I realized so many cities have failing shopping malls like Milwaukee, Indianapolis, and there is a sort of mall that is really empty in SLC it makes sense that car dependent malls wouldn't work in a city core
I’m from Indianapolis and can vouch that Circle Centre Mall in our downtown is essentially dead except for a large H&M. The end began in 2011 when Nordstrom (entire city block, three stories) pulled out. It was very hard to fill that large of a space. The city newspaper eventually took over the second & third floors - but now newspapers are in decline. Restaurants took over the first floor. Domino effect of store closures accelerated after Carson, Pirie, Scott went under a few years back. Then pandemic hit. Lost stores that had been there since the mall opened in 1995. Was a very glamorous, upscale place for 16 years.
I wonder what the “American Dream” mall will be like in Miami.
Probably like the one they already finished in New Jersey. Shit
one big parking lot
@UCmmH-HbXIa4AnmhGmWXQdrQ the one in nj is like super crowded and full all the time but like ok you can make your opinions while never even visiting it dumbass
Woah wasn't expecting to see the Santa Maria mall. Haven't been there since 2002
Once again, US city planners should learn from us in Singapore. Construct your towns with public infrastructure, government services, commercial shops and residential houses integrated together into a single cohesive block. So that everything is self sustaining rather than spread out.
They do this in the US, but using a system called planned community and it usually ends up costing people a pretty penny to purchase.
Here in Porto Alegre we don't really have suburban malls, the lack of zoning for one thing helped us avoid forming desolate suburbs, but multiple times when people built malls in the edge of town, the city would eventually encompass it as it grew and the malls made it highly valuable land