The character of the space is important. It informs and strengthens its identity. Now, Identity is something Corporate Retail America knows very well. It is extremely valuable to them - it's a commodity - it's their Brand. You can put a price on it. I just feel sometimes that they don't do it as well as they could.
Let's take a look at a suburban shopping area.
Impressions of the Wayside Commons in Burlington, Massachusetts.
A little bit of a description of the surrounding area is needed. There is a parking lot, with some pleasant planting throughout. The lot may hold up to 500 cars. Surrounding the parking is an almost continuous wall of retail, divided into storefronts. Each outlet is of the size of a conventional small scale building built before the turn of the last century. They are made of designs and materials that would've been found in a quaint late 19th century Main Street. The rooftops vary. Some have false mansards, some have false hip roofs, some have false cornices. Some have false second floor windows. Some have false turrets. The materials vary between wood and brick and Drivit and wood again. What it all has in common is it's falseness.
But let's suspend our disbelief. Let's just drop it and have a good time. After all, we're here to shop. The purpose of all of this falseness is just to remind me, if only in some shallow or superficial way, to feel at home. And to buy. It is to remind me of that time that never was, of that pleasant experience I had, or maybe it was my grandparents, or maybe nobody, of shopping on a quaint Main Street. The easy term for this, is Disneyland. The question is: is this the best we can do?
There are some things that work well here, however. The parking lot is of a reasonable scale. The sequences of spaces in the middle of the parking areas are broken down into a collection of smaller scale spaces by high vegetation and are well sized for the pedestrian traffic. Every storefront is visible while driving through, but, because of the landscaping, does not feel like a vast barren plain of asphalt. The retail wall is low, a story and a half, and sits in front of much taller buildings beyond. This breakdown of scale from the high-rise to the pedestrian low rise works well and feels comfortable. It’s a device that is used often in good urban design.
Just as we want to avoid an abrupt change in building scale, we need to consider proper changes in speed. As we make our way from the arterial road to the parking lot, to the parking space to the when we leave our car and walk to the storefront - each reduction in speed needs to have a recognizable point of transition. They seemed to do this well. The paths into the central parking areas are twisting, causing us to slow down. The parking areas are, as stated before, broken into clusters.
The tricks of the trade are there. They understand how to make all the necessary transitions in speed and scale and they do it successfully. It’s just inauthentic. Its character is weak and, as a consequence, so is its brand. Its value is diminished.