#greyfields

Greyfields and Ghostboxes

Robbie Moore, reporting for The International, takes a nuanced look at the state of the American shopping mall, contrasting its declining health before the stock market crash of 2008 with its diminished presence after:

The mall’s troubles started even before the financial crisis erupted. In the mid-1990s, the era of Mallrats, malls were still being constructed at a rate of 140 a year. But in 2001, a PricewaterhouseCoopers study found that underperforming and vacant malls, known as “greyfield” and “dead mall” estates, and “ghostboxes” — derelict big-box retail — were an emerging problem.

In 2007, a year before the crash, no new malls were built in America, for the first time in 50 years. A mall in Salt Lake City which opened in March 2012 was the first to be built since then. New Jersey’s ambitious $4 billion Xanadu mall and indoor ski slope – now re-financed and re-named the American Dream Meadowlands – still languishes, half-built. According to the New York Times, the American Dream, which was conceived before the crash, has struggled despite receiving upwards of $1 billion in the form of tax write-offs, free land and a highway connection from the state of New Jersey.

Evidence suggests that the decline of the American mall, a classic late-twentieth century space, has something to do with the rise of twenty-first century virtual space. Online shopping in America grew 14% last year, while overall retail sales were up only 3%, according to digital business analysts ComScore and the National Retail Federation. 129 million virtual shoppers stampeded the online sales on Cyber Monday last November, spending a record $1.46 billion. Tim Worstall, a Fellow at the Adam Smith Institute in London, argues that the success of online retail portends doom for the shopping mall. “As more shopping moves online we simply need less physical retail space,” Worstall writes in Forbes.

Another very cool intervention in abandoned urban space. I really like these sort of stunts, which always show that the city is alive.

I call this stunts because I doubt that things like this can really last as an installation. An alive city is not only full of people creating this sort of things, but also drunk youth crawling around pubs and clubs...and these guys can be really devastating. I know this from my city.

Anyway, urban hacking is quite a catchy name for these interventions. This one is only a drop in a sea. When there is a great idea behind them - or they just look good in the pictures, they add to the brand of their creators and became rather a marketing strategy. Just look at Banksy for example.