In The New York Times Magazine: Dead retail

REPURPOSE-DRIVEN LIFE:
America’s retail infrastructure is vast and abundant. That’s the problem.

Talk of American infrastructure tends to focus on inadequacies: roads that need to be repaired or widened, bridges fortified, electrical grids updated. All the more striking, then, that America’s retail infrastructure — its malls, supercenters, big boxes and other styles of store-clumping — has come to be characterized by rampant abundance. This has been a decades-long trend. But it has taken the economic downturn, with chain stores liquidating, mall tenancy slipping and car dealerships scheduled for closure, to focus popular attention on the problem with our retail infrastructure: there is too much of it….

Read the column in the June 14, 2009, New York Times Magazine (special architecture/infrastructure issue), or here.

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