A LA Times visit to The Americana at Brand.
The new Mayberry? [LA Times]
image by Carlos Chavez/Los Angeles Times
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los angeles
July 06, 2008
November 11, 2007
October 06, 2007
Los Angeles Denser Than New York City?
Metropolis looks at recent allegations by Robert Bruegmann that Los Angeles is actually more dense than New York City.
Not so say a group of UCLA planning students who reveal on the Livable Spaces web site that a measure of density is dependent on how density is defined:
When discussing density it is important to distinguish between population density and housing density. Population density measures the number of people per unit of land and varies depending on the time of day. Housing density is the number of homes per unit of land.
Sprawl Brawl [Metropolis]
June 03, 2007
April 22, 2007
The Lifestyle Centers of Southern California
The LA Times features a shift in shopping mall culture in Southern California, part of an international trend, where closed and fortified shopping complexes are being opened up (though still closed from their surroundings) and mimic traditional small town street patterning. Of course this is the Lifestyle Center, which we've covered elsewhere, though in Southern California, whose culture is intrinsically linked to the shopping mall, the changes go beyond the formal organization or styling of the mall:
Mall developers must make the revamped centers conjure up nostalgia for shoppers who might have had their first date at the mall, or spent their first hard-earned dollar there, while they stay on the cutting edge of American retail tastes, said Paco Underhill, a self-described "retail anthropologist" and the author of "Call of the Mall: The Geography of Shopping." "There's a generation of Americans out there who have disposable income but don't need anything. Therefore, providing them with something that gives them nostalgia … that's important," Underhill said.Developer Rick Caruso, who is responsible for several lifestyle centers in Southern California, shuns the term 'lifestyle center', instead preferring to describe these developments as streets that follow a story line: "They are more akin to streets than anything else. That's what we try to pattern them after. We write stories. We have story lines of all of the projects."
The trend toward enhancing the shopping experience can be seen in other countries such as South Africa or Japan, where more ambitious programs are being pursued:
In South Africa, developers are adding sports complexes for local schools near food courts and drive-in movie theaters on parking lot roofs. In Japan and Israel, theaters are stitching the movie complex into the larger shopping culture, tracking consumers closely so giveaways and coupons offer a carefully crafted premium that will keep them in the mall longer.Locally, Caruso's Americana at Brand, will be a mixed-use development featuring 475,000 square feet of retail and commercial space, including 100 luxury condominiums and 238 apartment homes.
Many well-intentioned critics, architects, and so-called urbanists will immediately dismiss or deride the evolution of the Lifestyle Center / Shopping Mall as a tool in the New Urbanist conspiracy, an attack on 'authenticity', or akin to the Disneyification of our cities. However, the Lifestyle Center may be the closest and most successful replacement for the 19th and 20th century 'city' or town center or Main Street that the 21st century has to offer. Through adding a wider range of programmatic activity and offering a residential component, these developments may be paving the way for an alternative to the gentrification or re-styling of failed 19th and 20th century urban centers championed by the above mentioned critics and architects.
Super-sized malls raise concerns [LA Times]
image by Myung J. Chun / LAT
