Eaton’s in Toronto

Macy’s in New York

Large format retail has existed in various forms since the concept first emerged in the 1850′s, when Le Bon Marché opened in Paris. It was four storeys high and one of the largest shopping centres in the world at the time. In time, famed department stores like Macy’s in New York, or Eaton’s in Toronto acted as magnets for tens of thousands of shoppers.

All three have several things in common: they are all more than one storey high, Macy’s and Eaton’s being almost ten storeys. They all take up just a single city block. For example, Macy’s flagship store fits around 100,000 square metres of retail space into just 3 acres. The Walmart mentioned later in this article has 21,000 sq. m on 18 acres.

They all have stunning architectural detail, such as beautiful stonework, windows, and cornices. They all face directly onto the street, which is lined with windows to display merchandise and covered with awnings.

The entire experience is filled with detail and colour. These are places you would not mind just sitting on a bench and watching the people walk by along the sidewalk, and the traffic whizzing by on the street. Now this is big done well. Yes, big can be good, as I have shown above. Read on for why many modern developments are big, and bad.

Below is an image that shows the relative sizes of several places. The two red squares on the left are what the average size of a building and city block look like in downtown Toronto. Then moving down, we see the shopping centre, located near Phoenix, Arizona, mentioned in my previous post. Finally, a massive Walmart Supercentre, also located near Phoenix. The supercentre is half a mile long on either side. That should fit a lot of retail space, right? Absolutely not, because as you can see, almost all of the space is taking up by useless and empty black pavement!

Need I say any more? This is the epitome of big done bad. A massive expanse of empty space, punctuated by nothing, with a glorified warehouse (Walmart) and a badly laid out collection of small stores on the perimeter. Nothing is more than one storey high. Most shockingly, almost the entire parking lot is empty, in the middle of the day. Actually, in a tour of dozens of similar big box developments, I did not find a single one with a parking lot that was more than half full.

People could ask, “But if land is cheap and plentiful, what does it matter if these developments pave it all over anyway?” My question is, why not make better use of it and get an even bigger return on investment on that already cheap land? It is quite clear that the above development could double the amount of retail space and still have ample parking. The increase in expected profits from doing that could be put to use designing a space that is actually attractive to people, they actually want to come there because they enjoy themselves, not only because they want to buy stuff.

In other words, building on a human scale. Can it really be that bad? Next time, I will some drawings of how a large format retail centre should be laid out. If you found this article interesting, please comment!

A building in Seattle demonstrates human
scale in its built form.

The city of Seattle has a series of design guidelines, including a section detailing how make a place human-friendly. Basically, the details are most important. Greenery to provide shade, details in building and window mouldings, awnings, and good lighting, all contribute to making a space appealing. However, all these features work together to make sure that a space does not appear too large. Awnings and moldings act as an imaginary outdoor ceiling, and trees contribute to this.

My previous blog talked about how commercial big box stores, with their giant parking lots, are just about the worst example of human scale planning in our everyday lives. How can they be better?

The fact is, the Big Box is simply too big. Before any of the detailing mentioned above can be incorporated, that box needs to be broken up into smaller, more realistically sized portions that are stacked on top of each other to a minimum of two storeys. That doesn’t mean they have to be tiny, but they shouldn’t be much deeper than a typical building in a city’s downtown. That means an average depth about 40 metres (130 feet). The Walmart store alone in your average Walmart supercentre is over 100m (330ft) deep, not to mention around 170m wide!

Reducing the horizontal size of these developments is the first step toward human scale design. Check back next time for a look at the environmental and economic reasons why modern shopping centres are way too big.

What does fill the headlines, however, are regular announcements of manufacturing plant closures, airline cutbacks, and the like. Here in Ontario the auto industry, which is an economic mainstay, exports over 90% of its product south of the border to the United States. Needless to say, people in the U.S. currently don’t have a very large appetite for automobiles right now. At the same time, the U.S. housing/mortgage crisis, which was at first expected to quickly dissipate, has continued with vigour, forcing many out of their sprawling suburban homes.

Thousands of Americans can no longer afford to live in the suburbs on their quarter acre lots and mazes of cul-de-sacs and repetitive miles of collector and arterial roads. They can’t afford their big cars, and they can’t afford their big houses. The price of fuel is one of the main reasons for this, along with the fact that cheap mansions combined with easy mortgages has simply resulted in way to many houses spread over far too much land.

Houses aren’t the only things that are taking up way to much space though. At the crossroads between any six lane suburban arterial road likely lies a huge expanse of paved open space, like this example in Mesa, Arizona.

This ridiculous arrangement is a result of cheap oil and suburban sprawl, it is unsustainable, and like the rest of suburban American, it is not built at a human scale. Therefore, such developments should be discontinued for good.

There are several economic reasons to stop this kind of development from happening in the future, especially in this time of turmoil. But the real fault of this lack of planning is that it is not really built for humans. It is built for the sole purpose of selling stuff, and does not enhance our lives in any way (besides allowing us to get lots of cheap stuff).

A place that is built on a human scale should be walkable, and a pleasurable environment: somewhere you might actually want to enjoy time in. It should be not only accessible, but pleasurable, to access the area by something other than an automobile. A giant, bare parking lot with giant big box stores on its fringes is not such an environment. We can do better, but it won’t come easy – but the good news is, we won’t necessarily have to demolish everything and start over. I’ll share some of my ideas and research on the subject in my next post!