More Literature Review Drafts

Fong, P. (2003). What makes big dumb bells a mega shopping mall? 4th International Space Syntax Symposium (pp. 10.1-10.14). London: Space Group Publications.

Within this paper, Fong presents a morphological analysis of a mega-scale shopping centre, stating that “the ‘shopping mall’ is a very interesting case in itself, in that it attempts to recreate the scene of natural movement using apparently opposing dynamics. Fong takes on the idea that shopping centres are an attraction for consumers through a series of specific design installations that are replicated from the external market, and improved to create a more desired shopping experience.

“Shopping malls are built to replicate the retail offer in established city centres, providing comparison shopping in a ‘continuous’ selling space on goods... all under one roof” (pg 10.1)

Fong, specifically focussing upon the movement throughout the shopping mall, states that “a critical approach within architectural discourse misses the opportunity to raise interesting questions concerning their design in terms of how natural laws of movement are seemingly opposed inside a shopping mall.”

Fong perceives that the classic dumb-bell concept, (large anchors at conflicting ends) is an important factor within mall dynamics in attracting consumers into and through the mall. (See below)

(The Urban Land Institute, 2002)

The Urban Land Institute (2002) provides a basic design diagram of the spatial elements of a typical regional shopping centre.

The natural movement economy theory proposed theory by Hiller (1993, 1996) is opposed to shopping mall design, stating that “Natural movement is the proportion of movement on each line that is determined by the structure of the urban grid itself rather than by the presence of specific attractors or magnets.” (Hillier, 1996: 161)

Fong explores the question of do planned shopping malls obey natural laws of movement, such that the distribution of movement can be predicted by the pattern of relative integration in the configuration.

Fong states through his analysis that from the point of view of mall design, minimising integration differences seems to be the objective of mall designers when thinking of the shopping centre as a managed ‘asset’. The main concern of mall managers’ and developers’ is rent optimisation, which is best achieved by ensuring an evenness of foot traffic to all its tenants. It would appear that although principles of attraction do have contributory effects on the distribution of movement through the arrangement, placement and allocation of space in the tenant mix process, configuration still provides a stronger predictive power, yet the addition of an attractor value increases the predictive value considerably.

Pong concludes that through her analysis, there is reasonable evidence that configuration has a direct relationship with the distribution of movement within planned, artificial shopping centre environments; hence, configuration has a stronger prediction than anchors, attractors or magnets.

Kuribayashi, Y., & Kishimoto, T. (2009). Configurational Comparison of City Centre Shopping District and Shopping Mall, with Observation of Shop Locations. In D. Koch, L. Marcus, & J. Steen (Ed.), 7th International Space Syntax Symposium (pp. 061:1-061:10). Stockholm: KTH.

Overview of Text

Kuribayashi and Kishimoto found that the shopping districts of major cities have been declining. The change in customer needs and the increase in the automobile consumption have led the public to shop in the convenient shopping malls. This circumstance has induced an additional problem of the weakening of interrelationship between the individual shops within the district which is crucial in means of both the local economy within in these districts and their surrounding community.

Kuribayashi and Kishimoto applied the Space Syntax Theory conducted by Polly Fong in designing the pedestrian movement within a commercial space to apply this theory to a city’s domestic shopping district to reveal the natural law of human attraction to the certain classification of shops. The paper discovers the successful point of the creation of commercial space by ‘shopping malls’, and compared them to the ‘shopping district’.

Through using the Space Syntax values, Kuribayashi and Kishimoto analysed four sample commercial spaces; two city centre shopping districts, Jiyugaoka and Daikanyama, and two shopping malls, Outletpark Iruma and Lalaport Yokohama. Through this analysis, the results showed that the sampled shopping malls were successful in attracting the pedestrians to the core compared to the sampled city centre shopping districts. Also, it was shown that the matching of customers’ behavioural pattern and shop locations are significant in the creation of successful shopping environments.

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.