Comprehensive piece on the pervasive but changing strip mall by Tristin Hopper in the National Post. A cross-country survey:
In Toronto, urban strip malls have often been fingered as the scruffy foundations of the city’s multi-ethnic mix. A home to Jewish bakeries, Hungarian butchers and Chinese acupuncturists, they have “become as important to their communities as the old warehouses and market districts have been to the inner city.
“We demolish them at our peril,” wrote Toronto urban affairs journalist John Lorinc in a 2005 essay.
Downtown it is a different story.
“We’ve probably reached Peak Car to some degree in North America,” said Gordon Price, director of the city program at British Columbia’s Simon Fraser University.
Amid soaring gas prices, better transit and a slow crawl toward denser cities, the children of today may be the first to own fewer cars than their parents.
“But we’ve overbuilt for the car, so you’ve got to start thinking about what you can do with structures that were never intended for the purposes we now need it for,” Mr. Price said.
In Vancouver, the car rollback has already begun.
Even during the day, there are enough empty parking spots in the city to account for 3% of all land downtown. In the core, more than 100,000 people share only two gas stations. Pushed aside by soaring land prices, the Vancouver strip mall is similarly nearing extinction.
The death of the strip mall is just a step in the process of intensification – that will depend on the location and the environment (built form) around it and the value of the land.
Just as one storey retail strips in downtown and “urban” locations are and have been demolished in favour of higher use office blocks, shopping malls and hotels, as well as apartment blocks (such as along major arterial roads), if the area around a strip mall evolves to a higher density, then the lower density use of the strip mall site will face pressures to redevelop.
While people may decry the strip mall as “tacky”, I recall a fairly recent uproar over the closure of the IGA (and liquor store) at Broadway & Arbutus – really just a two occupant strip mall – yet people wanted it to stay. It didn’t, of course, because the land was far too valuable to remain a parking lot.
That progression continues and other surface parking lots are and have been redeveloped – including those surrounding the successor to the strip mall – the enclosed shopping mall.