The Future Of Urban Malls

"Malls are a menace to New York: they drain the life out of vibrant neighborhoods by siphoning customers away from street-level retail and repelling Manhattan residents, leaving behind chintzy eyesores crowded with vacationing suburbanites. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom. But in recent years, as big-box stores and glitzy mall developments planned and funded in the bull-market 1990s appear in high-traffic pedestrian areas from Union Square to Harlem, fears among urban planners and theorists have shifted focus."

...Manhattan has managed to remake malls in its image, while the traits that make up malls have quietly bled into the city’s fabric. “There have always been cries that the mall is going to kill things or that it’s dying,” said Hardwick. “The amazing thing is how flexible the form actually is.” Even in a city with such a vibrant retail culture, the mall has found ways to penetrate. The end result in Manhattan has been two surprisingly similar variations: the mall as city and the city as mall."