Or do they.
When the mall biz loses its way, perhaps these design prescriptions can show owners a new path to profit. So says Jim Anderson of DIALOG design. As reported by Rebecca Keillor in Postmedia outlet The Vancouver Sun.
Some of his ideas involve thinking about transportation, as used by customers to get to the mall. Rest assured it isn’t all about bigger parking lots, he says. And it does involve consideration of the nature of the surrounding community.
Mr. Anderson spoke in part about his firm’s design for a $550M, 210,000 sq.ft.expansion and renovation of 1971-vintage Sherway Gardens, a 200-shop mall in the former Etobicoke, operated by Cadillac Fairview. It’s anchored by the Bay and Holt Renfrew. The usual suspects in mall retail are all there. Nordstrom has announced it will arrive in September 2017.
“People don’t go to the shopping centre to buy any more,” says Anderson . . . “They used to go to shop, but they can buy it online, so the experience needs to be a richer experience, more a sense of place.” . .
. . . When DIALOG designed Toronto’s Sherway Gardens, one of the largest malls in the GTA, Anderson says it applied this philosophy.
“We deliberately expanded it towards the street to start to address the street in an urban way, rather than simply be an island in the middle of a parking structure,” he says. “And not just addressing it in a ‘façadism’ type of way, like dressing up the exterior — a brick fortress in the middle of a parking lot — but actually activate the experience so that from the outside things were happening.” . . .
. . . They also designed the mall around where the transit stops are, and are going to be, preserving part of the site for a subway station, and really thinking about how people will be arriving at the mall, not simply “from a car to the entrance”.
“So how will people actually arrive by bicycle?” he says. “How would they arrive by foot? How would they arrive by bus? How would they first experience the shopping centre?”
Mr. Anderson makes a nice sales pitch. But. Frankly. Sherway Gardens is still a freeway & car dependent mall, now comprising roughly 1,200,000 sq.ft. It strongly reminds me of Tsawassen Mills. It has more local population, more freeways, and probably more competition. Today, Sherway Gardens boasts 6000 free parking spots (according to Parktopia) and valet parking for only $10. I couldn’t find the word “subway” in any publicity for Sherway Gardens, except for the sandwich shop.
We use lots of land for cars.
The Bloor-Danforth extension west to Sherway Gardens hasn’t been considered for a while. It’s low in priority, behind about a dozen other subway proposals: 1) Bloor-Danforth to Scarborough Centre, 2) DRL-short, 3) Yonge north to Richmond Hill Centre 4) Sheppard to STC (most likely); 5) DRL long. There’s also about a dozen LRT proposals (Jane LRT, Eglinton-West to airport, Eglinton-east to UTSC, Finch-West to airport, Finch-east to Yonge, Jane LRT, Waterfront West LRT, Portlands, etc which would also soak up funding first. The latest schemes for a westward extension of Line 2 don’t even go south to Sherway, maybe just a short extension along Dundas to Cloverdale for a new bus terminal that connects better to Missisauga transit (and Dundas street BRT) and to highway 427.
A Queensway LRT has been proposed, which looks good on paper as a development scheme except that the 80 Queensway bus is the 124rd busiest surface route – not a great candidate for rapid transit conversion.
So…rapid transit will not be coming to Sherway Gardens anytime soon.
Taking the Shorncliffe 123 bus from Kipling to Sherway was always an option, about 20 minutes, which is average for any bus ride. But for me, it was never any more enticing than just going all the way downtown to Eaton Centre, where everything else was walkable and eminently more interesting. I only when to Sherway when absolutely necessary.
The complexity of the site and floor plans make my head spin!
Yet another one that makes me glad to live in a walkable neighbourhood.