Shopping Centers and Sprawl
From Doug Thompson
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2011 (Presenter Emil Pocock, Professor of History & American Studies, Eastern Connecticut State University) - Shopping centers have become ubiquitous icons of American sprawl, but ironically they emerged from quite different visions of suburban communities. Modest assemblages of shops and services were often included in the plans of exclusive nineteenth- and early twentieth-century suburbs to serve the day-to-day needs of local residents. With the proliferation of suburbs after World War II, even larger shopping centers were built independently of residential development as convenient alternatives to downtown shopping.
Alarmed at the loss of community life in the vast expanses of relentless post-World War II residential housing, Victor Gruen promoted shopping malls as multi-purpose synthetic community centers. His early 1950s malls provided space for retail shopping, but also for a variety of other civic, cultural, and entertainment functions, including theaters, meeting rooms, art shows, and post offices in pedestrian-oriented settings. His efforts to preserve a sense of community in the burgeoning suburbs were largely ignored, but his innovative designs (including the first entirely enclosed mall) were copied by developers focused exclusively on retail shopping. The resulting islands of large one- and two-story enclosed malls, surrounded by parking lots and linked to suburbs by networks of limited access highways, became integral to modern suburban sprawl.
Nevertheless, shopping malls cannot be blamed for creating sprawl and may not have even been inevitable. They resulted from a constellation of factors, including growing ambivalence about city life, preference for individual home ownership, private automobiles at the expense of public transportation, and demand for consumer goods. Official policies of post-war dispersal of the population, subsidized highways, tax laws that favored new commercial development, and lack of effective suburban planning made stand-alone shopping centers practical and profitable enterprises that filled many of the needs of suburban living, while they also contributed to modern sprawl.
This lecture was recorded at "Smart Growth," the Elizabeth Babbott Conant Interdisciplinary Conference on the Environment at Connecticut College on March 4 and 5, 2011.
https://www.conncoll.edu/academics/majors-departments-programs/majors-and-minors/goodwin-niering-center-for-the-environment/conferences/smart-growth/
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