Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

Comment by flexie | Hacker News Reader

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In Europe, malls are still constructed in many places and they have the advantage of being built a few decades after many of the US malls.

Where I live summers are a bit too warm and winters a bit too cold to make outdoor shopping joyful. Also, streets are noisy and full of aggressive drivers and the sidewalks are full of holes and broken tiles. So in the last few years this 1.5M population city has seen the construction of 10 shopping malls, most of which are actually really nice "gathering places" as you put it and most of which seem to thrive.

One advantage from most of the US malls that I have been to is that cars are parked under the malls, not around them, that most of the malls are built near subway or tram stops and that they somehow fit nicely into the surrounding architecture.

Often the malls are built in the city center and usually in a very nice quality. Usually the malls have one major supermarket chain in the basement that acts as an anchor store and usually they have a cinema and a food court in the top floor that offers not just the usual fast food but often also some decent food.

I really enjoy shopping in a mall and until someone fixes the problem of waiting and paying for delivery I don't see online shopping making malls obsolete.

On a brief but pleasant trip to Switzerland, I got around using their wonderful transit system. Every transit station was also a commercial hub. Big stations had big shops like supermarkets and department stores. Little stations had little shops like bakeries and banks.

Any restructuring of retail shopping in the US would have to include thinking about how entire districts are laid out. It takes one person -- the owner -- to restructure a mall, but considerably more cooperation and time to restructure neighborhoods.

In some cases this is already happening. The best known example I can think of is Tyson's Corner in Northern Virginia. Already a shopping and commercial area, they're building the a new metro line out to it. This is coinciding with a restructuring of the entire area to be pedestrian friendly instead of car focused and it's absolutely transforming the entire city. It's probably the largest restructuring program in the U.S. at present. Each metro stop is either a shopping paradise or near a bunch of professional offices. All new residential complexes are being planned and the area is absolutely exploding with activity.

http://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/tysons/

Tysons is the suck. They're not restructuring it so much as trying to work around the piss-poor depressingly suburban "urban planning" of the place. Yes, it's got a metro line now, but it's a big concrete monstrosity along the middle of a huge multi-lane road, instead of the sleek, organic, integrated transit you see in places like Chicago or New York.[1] Most of the stops drop you off in a giant parking lot along side Route 7. The attempts to make Tyson's "pedestrian friendly" involve basically giving up on the existing street-level and building an elevated walking level connecting the mall and a few office buildings and apartment buildings.

A much better example is Atlantic Station in Atlanta: http://atlanticstation.com. They nuked the existing streets and put in a human-scale street grid: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8a/Atlantic_.... All the parking is underground or at the periphery of the development. The only thing missing is a subway stop (the Arts Center stop is across that awful oppressive highway).

[1] Contrast http://wamu.org/sites/wamu.org/files/styles/headline_landsca... with http://mlmerillat.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/chicago-el1.jp....

Yeah Tysons is still a warzone right now. But they're on something like year 5 of a 35 year restructuring plan. I still have high hopes. There's lots of weirdness left over from the previous "design", like stations letting off into low density areas like next to a bunch of car dealerships. But the overall plan I think is still promising. If they can convert those low density areas into high density housing, offices and mixed-zone shopping.

I do wish it was more revolutionary like your examples, but there's not much reason to think that Tyson's won't look a bit more like Chicago's loop in 20 years.

I'm actually on the side of wishing our local politicians had gotten their heads out of their asses and buried the lines, but we get what we get and I'm of the ilk that still thinks elevated lines look retro futuristic and cool.

http://cooldcre.com/image_store/uploads/8/6/5/6/4/ar13436975...

http://dcmud.blogspot.com/2011/02/tysons-developers-plan-40-...

http://thetysonscorner.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Tysons...

TBH, it doesn't affect me at all, except that Tyson's, being so overly car centric, is a place I don't go because it's such a grind to get around right now. That and I'm still hoping they extend the line out to Dulles so we'll finally live in a fully connected urban area that befits the density of NoVA and D.C.

> That and I'm still hoping they extend the line out to Dulles so we'll finally live in a fully connected urban area that befits the density of NoVA and D.C.

IMO, as another denizen of the D.C. area, the Silver Line, once completed, will not fully connect the D.C. area. There are other developed areas that will still not be reachable.

Take the 28 corridor, for instance: home to the NRO, a bunch of defense contractors, tech companies, the Dulles Expo Center, the Air and Space Museum, and a lot of residential and office space. This region will still not be connected. Going up and down 28 itself is something that almost certainly has to be done by car; I don't know of many (or any) buses that would enable one to get from, say, Centreville to Reston.

>One advantage from most of the US malls...is that cars are parked under the malls, not around them...

Thanks for bringing this up. Dealing with parking is a much more complex problem than was assumed for the last 50 years or so. Better modeling should improve the situation going forward though, and could help effectively redevelop some of these megamall wastelands too.

I imagine that big part of that is the large percentage of the US population that leaves on or near a coast. Major underground excavation isn't really possible when ground level is only 10m or so above sea level/the water table.

Some malls in Spain use attached parking buildings instead. They aren't pretty, but they do allow the mall to remain inside the city.

A few years ago I went to a mall in Stuttgart. The interesting thing was I could have been in any mall in America. The layout, architecture, parking garage, etc., was right out of the US, and even the advertising was all in English. It's like eating at McDonald's in Tokyo. What's the point?

What's the point?

To quote Pulp fiction "It's the little differences". I love going to malls and supermarkets when I'm in a new country or city. Sure they're 95% the same, but those other 5% are often unique for the area and quite telling.

I lived in Germany around 1970 when there were no malls or McDonald's there. What was fun was even department stores were palpably different than in the US. Everything was different, and that made it much more fun. Even the grocery stores were way, way different (I sure loved the German cheese selection!).

The Villagio in Doha is a good example of little differences, like an ice skating rink located in the middle of the food court and a knock-off of the Venetian's canal running through it.

It's like eating at McDonald's in Tokyo. What's the point?

Shaka Shaka Chicken, of course.

Which mall in Stuttgart? I lived there a few years ago and never noticed the shopping areas looking American...

I don't recall, other than it was a big one.

There is no such thing as "Europe".

I don't know of any malls being constructed in the Netherlands.

This actually isn't true. Europe is a real place, unlike Middle Earth or Narnia or Canada. It's just west of Asia and north of Africa, if you can believe it!

Leidschenhage (http://www.denhaagdirect.nl/winkelcentrum-leidschenhage-verb...)

In de Bogaard, includes 3 malls according to http://www.denhaag.nl/en/residents/to/In-de-Bogaard.htm

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