Christmas break brought me back to Montreal visiting family, and family took me out to the post-holiday sales in the constellation of big-box stores along Montreal’s southern beltway, highway 30. Having all but grown up in the area, I’ve been witness to the transformations that the commercial space along the highway has experienced. There are some hard lessons to learn from the silly congestion of Christmas shopping and the impact of random growth in the context of the severely zoned outer suburbs.
It all started, as these things do, with a shopping mall. Les Promenades St-Bruno was built, most probably before I was born, in an empty forest at a highway cloverleaf. It has had the most interesting history, largely due to the fact that it has existed in the longest time frame. It was originally conceived as a monolithic, all-purpose two-story cross pedestrian mall, but has had to adapt to the chaos of economic life in highly contrasted patterns. On the inside, at least two of its branded anchor stores, the supermarket Steinberg and the department store Eaton, have outright shut down without warning due to bankruptcy. This would have likely killed off any other mall, but they survived by going as far as removing anchors entirely on one wing. It is noteworthy that the pedestrian environment on the inside is top-notch, crowded by the proliferation of kiosks and coffee shops in the center aisle, but not so crowded that it felt crowded even in the madness of Christmas sales, and lit in such a way that one does not feel pressured to consume. I like to think that this is the kind of quality Austrian émigré Victor Gruen was looking for when he built the first mall in Minnesota.
On the outside, the mall has become the black hole around which a galaxy of random big box stores orbits. It seemed innocent enough when the first of them, a Toys ‘R’ Us, opened when I was still a child (the memories!). That store is well beyond the main parking lot of the mall, so you must inevitably drive out from the mall to get there. This is exactly the kind of junk Gruen wanted to be rid of with his shopping mall. Over the years the growth in boxes, big and small, has been accelerating. Brands like Wal-Mart and Best Buy, which were nowhere on the economic horizon at the mall’s inauguration, now have stores there, and so does the usual supply of home renovation megasurfaces, home decoration, electronics, furniture, and so on. Gruen’s idea of recreating a European shopping street in an air-conditioned environment had merit, but it’s obvious at this mall that it ran into the problem with all monolithic constructions; the future is unpredictable, and the unpredictable has to be built somewhere. One could have argued that big box stores could not be connected to the pedestrian space in the mall due to their size and the necessity of having giant parking lots. On the other hand, a lot of the new buildings, standing alone in the middle of their individualized parking spaces, are outrageously small and disconnected. Their affectations, a fast-food, a coffee shop, a bank, an electronics shop, would be much better served if directly accessible by foot from the mall. That is not the case. Instead, a mess of traffic strangles the area a little bit more each year.
In the face of such competition, the discount outlet stores a few kilometres east, anchored by the astonishingly popular IKEA store, decided not to bother with a mall at all. The commercial spaces on both sides of highway 20 going into Montreal island are awful in every conceivable way. It appears that their very cheapness in design may be part of the design intent. In terms of connectivity it is a disaster. It is simply not possible to go from a store to a coffee shop without walking across a huge parking lot. You must drive from shop to shop even while inside the property. Snowy conditions push the inhospitality to intolerable heights. Somehow, the presence of a hotel in a dreary, industrial-wasteland environment makes this “urban”. I did find some great deals there, however.
There may be some hope to reconcile suburban shopping with chaos if the new commercial project a few kilometres west of the mall takes off upon being completed. Following the trend of building lifestyle centers that has swept the U.S., the Quartier Dix30 (it sits at the cloverleaf of highways 10 and 30) has managed to integrate boutique shopping, regular-sized stores and big box shopping in the same space, adding the lifestyle center essentials of high-end restaurants and a theatre for entertainment (a real theatre, not a movie theatre, although it also has one of those). It has its own magazine.
The plan is as simple as you could imagine it. In the center there is the “main street” along which all of the high-end boutiques, restaurants and activities are accessible, with token parallel parking spaces that must supply roughly 1% of the actual parking needs of the center. (Underground parking garage available in order to service high-end theatre and restaurant patrons, although there is no shortage of parking anywhere.) Behind those buildings (all stand-alone) is a medium-sized parking ring and medium-sized stores. Beyond those are the huge parking lots and the huge stores. The plan does have an advantage over a regular mall, in that the street can easily be extended outwards as the invention of new businesses necessitates it. In that sense it does fit the criteria for being urbanism, which a mall does not. The stores for now are low-rise, low-cost boxes but since they are all individual buildings they can easily be swapped for something else when their lifespan runs out.
The biggest shock to my perception of the place was the overwhelmingly positive reaction of my family, all suburban or exurban dwellers, to the quality of the design. They feel that they finally have a “town” in their corner of the metropolis. Given that a subdivision simply cannot be defined as urban by its disconnected nature, this lifestyle center does qualify as being the only thing that can act as a town in a 5 km radius. I think it, unlike a mall or a discount outlet zone, has the potential to grow into something over the coming years. It challenges the suburban myth that people somehow desire to live in a disconnected, auto-dependent environment. Affordable housing is what motivated their residential choices. They did not want the suburban model beyond having their own house.
This brings us to an important question, which is to ask how a purely commercial space can be a town. Historically it was not unusual for merchants to set up markets outside cities that were mostly temporary in nature, and the short-term construction quality of outer-beltway markets expresses a similarly nomadic future. These places simply do it at a bigger scale, in large part because people buy a lot more stuff today than they did historically. The outcome is that the marketplace has grown to such a size that it has become a city in itself. The other important factor is the existence of a large amount of diverse activities in closely-connected proximity. I know you’re thinking that shopping and shopping is not diversity, but the fact that there is so much that is unexpected is what draws people to these commercial cities for the simple pleasure of it. People do not go to hypermarkets to hang out, so the malls and lifestyle centers must be doing something more than commercialism. Regular trips to marketplace cities have become the suburban equivalent of a trip to town, and the only remaining difference between the two is that people live in the towns.
This difference may not exist for much longer.
Reference: Les boîtes, les grandes surfaces dans la ville, René Péron
A conversation about the geometry of nowhere
In response to my last article, Bruce Liedstrand of Community Design Strategies in Paris writes,
Enclosure creates a room, but it’s not sufficient to create a place. You can see this in Paris, where some of the best places in the city are not enclosed, for example along the Seine, or the Luxembourg garden. And the most enclosed places, like Place Vendôme, are not very interesting.
To get a good understanding of the relative impact of enclosure and open space on place, all we have to do is take a long walk along the axe historique. Start at Place de la Concorde, which was about 50% sidewalk 50% free space when it was created and is not enclosed. All the free space was converted to road and now it is perilous to get across, but still a place. Walk down to Rond-Point de l’Élysée through a wood with substantial open space to walk across. I don’t know if that counts as enclosure, but it’s a good place. Then you have the model of place, the Avenue des Champs-Élysées with its straight-aligned buildings, that is also a place with 50% sidewalk and 50% road. And it is a major road, 10 lanes of traffic, but that doesn’t really interfere with it as a place because there is little reason to cross the road, and it can be done in two steps thanks to traffic islands.
Once you’re up the hill and you go across the monster Place de l’Étoile (horrible place, all cars driving maniacally so that pedestrians have to cross in underground passages), you end up on Avenue de la Grande Armée, which is morphologically identical to the previous avenue except that some of its space is taken by parking lots. That means the ratio of sidewalk to road is much less than 50/50. It’s also much less crowded and much less attractive than the previous avenue, but it still works.
After you get across Porte Maillot to Avenue Charles de Gaulle in Neuilly, then you find the same buildings with the same alignments and the same enclosure as the two previous avenues, except this time the space has been traffic-engineered to hell, combined with speed cameras to dissuade speeding. What space there was on Grande Armée has been cut even further, and the result is a dead street on what is a major business center of the city.
Finally cross the bridge and climb your way up to the Parvis de La Défense, where you will find that the buildings are modern and completely random, but the space is fully open to people and always full of people. (Even on Sundays!) I interviewed the master planner for the northern expansion, and he said the developer of La Défense did not agree to build the 25m wide pedestrian bridge he had designed to connect the site to the main place. After their small “passerelle” failed they backed down and built the full bridge, and it works, always full of people.
So there you have it, the closest thing to a controlled experiment on place and enclosure. Enclosure turns out to be irrelevant.
Have a nice walk.
La Défense is a business place, and it works at what it is. But compared to Avenue Charles de Gaulle, which is another business place, and which has the same architecture and alignments as the rest of Paris, it is a much better place.
Can you say this is not a good place?
Look at all the people. They’re not locked up in their offices. The neighborhood is set up so you can go straight to your office to the metro using tunnels, but when I was there I always preferred taking a detour on the surface. Take my word for it, people even go there on the weekends to teach their kids how to ride bikes and roller-skate. They don’t care that the buildings aren’t aligned.
What I am asking with my article is how can we reduce and remove sprawl without going through an expensive process of total demolition for which we won’t have the money anymore? We don’t have the choice of your small neighborhood park. A place and a park are very different things anyway. Cities existed for centuries without parks, but never without place. If we reintroduce place in sprawl cities, that means shops that rely on place to survive don’t have to open up in the mall anymore, they can do business anywhere because the entire city is a mall (one of the first things I realized about Paris). Then your city starts to grow around place instead of around roads, and people have a reason to linger.
I didn’t redesign the Target store, I left it there as a necessity of the context, and the people at La Défense aren’t looking at the buildings. They’re a necessary part of the décor, but they’re not the reason people use the place, or any place.La Défense became a success, despite everyone’s intent, because economic conditions forced the developers to break the master plan and allow any random building to be built. Had they not done so it would be exactly like Empire State Plaza in Albany. The difference between the two is not architectural, it is socio-economic.
You do not need to remove cars to make a good place, you only need to remove the exclusivity for cars. What makes a good place is total freedom of movement for everyone, including the freedom to stop and linger. You can’t do that in traffic engineered space because you are confined between very narrow limits. They tell you how fast to go, when to stop, where to turn, it’s a nightmare, but one that we put up with to go fast.
Deserts can make a good place, although there is not much desert urbanization. (Desert driving is a lot of fun nevertheless.) Open space alone does not make a place, you also need people there, and the reason that people go through any place is to participate in and generate social and economic networks. This was not done at Empire State Plaza but was done at La Défense.
The issue is at core about freedom. How much freedom of movement do I enjoy, how much freedom to grow and build do I enjoy? In a place you can walk anywhere and build anything anywhere, or just occupy the space to conduct some activity like playing hockey or learning to ride a bike. That creates networks and attracts people. In sprawl the entire space is traffic engineered. To move around you are practically on a conveyor belt, offered only a linear path, delimited speed and a select few choices. You can’t build anything because of the zoning. The choices available to you have been selected by the traffic engineers and the planners, and they only fit their model of what they want you to do. There is no creativity possible to invent your own journey. A famous game designer once said “a game is a series of interesting choices.” What kind of choices does sprawl offer?
The one place in sprawl where people are given a shred of creativity is the mall, and that’s how people who live in sprawl spend their free time. You can go there and just hang out, inventing an activity from nothing. It’s all the place they have left.