Randhurst Mall to Newbury Street and Back

While visiting Boston for the American Planning Association national conference a couple of months ago, I spent part of an afternoon shopping on Newbury Street. I couldn’t help but think to myself, ‘this is the future of shopping.’ When Victor Gruen, father of the modern shopping mall, first started designing suburban shopping malls in the 1950s, he was responding to a change in American lifestyle. The automobile was changing how people went about their lives, ultimately leading to sprawling development known as suburbs. Gruen saw the opportunity to provide goods and services to these people in their own neighborhoods so that they did not have to travel to the central city to buy things. However, more than fifty years after Gruen’s designs accommodated how people bought things, the American lifestyle has once again changed. Suburban life is no longer what everyone dreams of achieving. With economic and environmental crises always on the cusp of reality, Americans are changing the way they do things. The sustainability movement has grown from just recycling egg cartons to affecting how we live our lives. As the redevelopment of cities and inner-ring suburbs outpaces the growth of far out suburbs over the next decade, retailer repositioning will become more commonplace to serve this growing lifestyle oriented demographic. For the evidence of this, look no further than what Casto is doing with Randhurst Village outside of Chicago [article here], one of Victor Gruen's first malls. While the traditional mall ideal will change by way of the physical form it takes, the purpose will remain the same: to provide consumers with the goods and services that they demand – wherever they are located.

– by Jacob Dietrich, a Senior Urban Planning Student at Ball State University. Jake is currently completing his internship with Milhaus Development