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Feature Article, May 2006
A Global View
What U.S. retail is learning from the rest of the world.
Ken Christian AIA and Jeff Gunning AIA
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In a country known for its great modern architecture, Spain embraced the innovative design of a retail center around a train station with Principe Pio in Madrid.
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One glance at the soaring glass canopy at Principe Pio in Madrid proves what retail outside the United States has been claiming for years: shopping and great architecture can be synonymous. Chalk it up to a willingness to take risks or higher cultural sensitivity to the value of design, but developers and municipalities around the world are proclaiming that retail environments can be both iconic and commercially successful.
But that’s not all that American retail is learning from its international counterparts these days. After decades of exporting the American retail model, where design issues like circulation, access and tenant mix were tested and proven, today’s retail developers and designers are looking abroad for solutions to issues like the decline of the traditional mall format, the need for infill development, and changing shopper preferences. This mix of the tried and true with imported lessons from around the globe is driving the future of retail in the United States — and providing exciting destinations for the next generation of shoppers.
A Community of Shoppers
We’ve labeled them “Generation Mall” and they represent the most technologically savvy and diverse population the United States has ever seen. Raised in an enclosed mall environment and well seasoned to online shopping, this generation of shoppers, also known as Millennials, is not wowed by the traditional American shopping center environment. Instead, they go shopping for the social aspects the activity affords. The American retail industry, long accustomed to catering to the lone shopper’s desire for convenience and efficiency, is looking for ways to reinvent shopping environments to better embrace the public aspect of shopping.
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In Athens, Greece, Veso Mare’s mix of large and intimate open spaces provides numerous opportunities to gather with friends and family.
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Fortunately, they need to look no further than Latin America, where a large population of young families has long associated shopping with community. After years of designing enclosed centers, Latin American developers are starting to re-embrace the region’s long legacy of market shopping. Open, public plazas like those found in the newly remodeled and highly successful Metro Centro in San Salvador have proven to be strong assets to attracting younger shoppers — and have established that security concerns can be addressed through thoughtful design, lighting and logical circulation.
At the same time, Europe, which has successfully preserved its High Street shopping model for decades, provides successful examples of urban retail schemes that weave large, open plazas and smaller intimate spaces with retail, restaurant and entertainment options. Greece’s Escape Center, for example, creates an airy urban oasis surrounded by dining and shopping options in the heart of a business district, creating opportunities for social activities, civic events and rotating exhibitions at all hours of the day.
A Leisurely Lifestyle
At the same time, this evolving, socially oriented U.S. shopper is looking for more entertainment and leisure options in his or her retail environment. With greater disposable income and more leisure time, today’s typical American shopper seeks activities and new experiences without leaving the shopping center. Although this represents a shift in U.S. shopping trends, international shopping has always included a large entertainment component. For decades, entertainment — from movie theaters to indoor ski slopes — has occupied a significantly larger percentage of space within international centers than U.S. centers, and as a result, developers and designers around the globe have perfected strategies for maximizing revenue and generating productive foot traffic.
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A mix of residential, retail, hotel and office space at Shenzhen’s City Crossing will provide a model for similar development in other Chinese cities.
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For one, developers overseas have proven that entertainment doesn’t have to be grouped in one location within a shopping center. Places like the MixC in Shenzhen’s City Crossing weave entertainment offerings like a world-class ice skating rink with retail, giving visitors a glimpse of the excitement as they shop. Many international shopping centers are revealing that even the most unlikely of entertainment options can be commercially successful if they are seamlessly linked with the larger center. For example, Japan’s LaQua Tokyo Dome City shopping center boasts both a large spa and a towering roller coaster that sends visitors flying above the shops below.
Anchors Away
Developers and retail designers in the United States are looking a new ways to create viable retail environments that do not rely on fading department stores. In Europe, the desire to capture the authenticity of traditional shopping streets has created anchors like big boxes, entertainment options, hypermarkets and supermarkets, not typically seen in American malls. Chains like Carrefour and Tesco reveal the strong link between food and retail in this region and have also opened up possibilities for the eventual integration of grocery stores in American retail environments.
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A pinwheel circulation provides an innovative anchoring strategy at Panama’s Multiplaza Pacific.
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In Europe and other parts of the world, the minor emphasis on anchors, and therefore greater flexibility in floor plans, offers tangible examples for ways to reinvent the U.S. retail environment without relying on traditional anchors. In Latin America, for example, where few large-format department stores exist, the traditional U.S. circulation pattern has experienced a makeover. Multiplaza Pacific, a successful 1.1 million-square-foot retail center in Panama City, has a pinwheel circulation that clusters retail and entertainment uses around a series of public courts. Asia and Australia have had great success with innovative vertical circulation, a daunting concept for many U.S. developers. Specifically, Australia’s Victoria Gardens in Melbourne stacks big box retailers like IKEA and Kmart in an innovative way in order to create more density. The key to this is not just floor-to-floor heights and vertical movement, but creative approaches to ground floor entries and circulation.
Mixing It Up
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360° Kuwait will organize a range of restaurants into specialized food pavilions.
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Around the United States, developers and municipalities are learning the value of mixed-use, particularly in creating sustainable commercial environments. When residential drives a development, an around-the-clock community provides a live-in customer base and enlivens public spaces. Office space, hotels and transit also strengthen the retail environment, providing alternative anchors, cutting down on sprawl and pollution, and creating mutually beneficial relationships among uses in urban-style, live-work-play environments. But even as traditional mall REITs become more open to mixed-use, these projects are still complex and relatively untested in the United States; they require the sensitive integration of parts and collaboration of teams to succeed. Fortunately, examples from around the world offer insight into how best to achieve this success, and this has encouraged some intrepid American developers to take the plunge.
In Europe, living above the shop and transit-oriented development has always been an important way of life, even as building American-style malls like Centro Oberhausen in Germany and Blue Water in the U.K. became popular in the 1990s. In recent years, limitations on building in suburban areas have forced many developers to revisit and update its rich history of mixed-use environments in order to generate new solutions for infill development. Projects like Salamanca’s rail station and Salford Quays in Manchester, U.K., are proving the value of mixed-use development not only in creating exciting retail environments, but also in reenergizing cities.
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Even in the heat of San Salvador, a series of public plazas at Metro Centro provide popular places to socialize.
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In China, the need for creative infill in congested cities has pushed the envelope for innovations in mixed-use and transit-oriented development. City Crossing in Shenzhen, for example, creates a highly integrated mix of retail, office, hotel and residential, designed to provide a model for development in other Chinese cities. These projects can provide important precedents for U.S. developers trying to navigate the complexities of public/private partnerships, as cities from Washington, D.C., to Dallas to Los Angeles look at ways to revitalize their downtowns and create sustainable communities along transit lines.
The Dining Difference
Especially as residential-driven mixed-use projects grow in popularity, food — always a critical component of international shopping — is becoming more important than ever to U.S. retail development. In addition to integrating hypermarkets and conventional food stores, shopping centers around the world have always made dining a critical component of the retail and entertainment environment. While the traditional American-style food court was exported to Europe and Asia in the 1980s and 1990s, it never really caught on in those cultures that valued the quality of food over the convenience of food. Lately, though, a mix of restaurant types — from gourmet establishments to cafes and bars, and a variety of food-based retail — from fresh food markets to organic grocery stores — are borrowing from the dining environments long associated with shopping from Central America to Australia.
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A mixed-use development in Manchester, U.K., has helped to revitalize the city’s urban district.
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Many of the countries that were among the first to adopt the food court have begun to deconstruct it, creating an entirely new type of dining experience. As developers in the United States search for ways to reinvent the traditional — and some say tired — food courts, it would behoove them to look beyond our borders for such new concepts as specialty cuisine pavilions to market-based formats. These cultures put great emphasis on the role food and dining play in the lives of people, and as a result, their dining establishments exalt food — how it’s prepared, how it’s displayed, and how it’s consumed.
The Next Generation
As retailers, shoppers and cities change, the traditional American retail model is changing. While the tried-and-true elements still work well in most of the world’s cultures, enlightened developers and designers are proving that some rules are worth breaking. As the U.S. retail industry looks for ways to solve new challenges in the industry, the lessons of other countries might be just what the doctor ordered. And as they search for what shopping will look like in the future, they’ll find many of their international counterparts are already well on their way.
Ken Christian, a vice president in RTKL’s London office, and Jeff Gunning, a vice president in RTKL’s Dallas office, have designed retail and entertainment environments around the world.
©2006 France Publications, Inc. Duplication or reproduction of this article not permitted without authorization from France Publications, Inc. For information on reprints of this article contact Barbara Sherer at (630) 554-6054.
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