Literature Review

Goss, Jon. The "Magic of the Mall". An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment. Honolulu: Association of American Geographers, 1993.

‘The 'Magic of the Mall’ acts as a broad overview of the theory of mall design, discussing the reasons for the techniques involved in constructing a mall and how they affect the consumer. Goss aims to explain that developers have wanted to moderate the collective guilt over obvious consumption by designing a fantasized dissociation from the act of shopping into the retail built environment. In other words, shopping makes us feel guilty, or insecure; but if we don't believe like we're shopping, then it's acceptable. So the developer and architects go to great lengths to build environments that help us pretend that the experience within the mall is segregated from the external ‘real’ world through a selection of successful design principles that aim towards the ultimate goal of developer profits.

Although this text acted as the founding motivation towards my thesis, the article was published in 1993, so some arguments that Goss creates are no longer applicable towards the problem’s causes and effects. I think Goss's failure to consider the time-geography does undermine his argument slightly, however, the modern strip mall, which may be more closely related to my thesis topic, has a less constructed atmosphere than the indoor mall that is the focus of Goss's work, and, in-turn human behaviour would be experienced differently within these different atmospheres. The main failure within this text is that it focuses too much upon the success of mall design being a failure towards human society. For example, to consider that people go to malls because they've been deceived into feeling that they're not consuming. Consumers go to the mall because it offers something that is genuinely desirable, i.e. ‘the one-stop shop.’

Colwell, P. F., & Munneke, H. J. (1998). Percentage leases and the advantages of regional malls. The Journal of Real Estate Research , Vol. 15, Iss. 3, pg. 239-253.

This article specifically examines the value-enhancing aspects of percentage leases and explores the mechanisms of tenant mix, risk sharing and rent discrimination through which this value is created.
Colwell and Munneke argument focuses upon the use of percentage leases leading to superior returns by allowing a rent structure that approaches perfect price discrimination and that risk sharing through the use of percentage leases may also create value for the property owner and lead to lower rents for tenants. In other words, a win-win economic situation for all involved.

The argument created in this article is relevant to a very small specific mall structure where the landlord has complete confidence in the gross income of its tenants. The only prime candidates for this would be national tenants with proof of a high positive income, relevant to it context and having some surrounding precedents. However, if this is the case, the tenant would not be willing to do a percentage lease, which would be taking a sum of the profits when the business has already created a standing within the current economic market. The scheme is correct, but I believe that the justification of real-world application would not be as simple as Colwell and Munneke perceive.

Brown, M. G. (1999). Design and Value: Spacial form and the economic failure of a mall. The Journal of Real Estate Research , Vol. 17, Iss.1/2, pg. 189-226.

This article focuses upon one mall, Beau Monde, which opened in 1985 and defaulted on loan payments and sold for about 25% of its construction costs to ‘Happy Church’ claiming “as if it was built for us.” Browns focus is upon three main areas; space is what real estate and building, site and urban design have in common; spatial and related visual patterns have deep behavioural and cultural constraints often overlooked; and when these patterns combine with non-rational human behaviours, serious decision and judgment errors are more likely. Brown claims in this article, “The real intelligence, the central nervous system of a building, is its spatial configuration. The special central nervous system choreographs interface patterns: person to person, goods to person. If not adequately interconnected, parts of the building served by its spatial interconnection, or even all of it, will cause atrophy.”

This article by Brown focuses upon a very important part of the successful shopping mall design; spatial syntax, when properly structured, this link (the shopping centre) works top-down from the macro level of the street to the micro level of the merchandise, global to local, not bottom-up. Brown believes that spatial syntax is so important as to claim that in some cases a well-designed and otherwise attractive shopping centre can countervail a poor location. Whilst in-turn a poorly designed shopping centre can be redeemed by a good location, it is not inevitable, especially when a shopper has a choice on where to shop.