A post-mall America
On Iceland's best concert hall, zombie malls, and what at least one American city ought to try to recoup some value from big concrete parking lots
Visitors to Iceland can scarcely avoid at least one stop in Reykjavik, and one of the most prominent features of the waterfront near the city center is a rather striking concert hall and convention center called Harpa. More ambitious than just an opera house or a concert venue, Harpa integrates conference venues, banquet halls, smaller meeting rooms, shops and restaurants, art displays, and public spaces, all wrapped around a main hall that seats 1,800.
■ It's a bold facility for a metropolis of a quarter-million people. Iceland doesn't have an unlimited resource base upon which to draw; the entire country has just 360,000 residents. Yet Harpa is a busy place, with a virtually non-stop schedule of events.
■ Across the United States, communities have been coming to terms with the widespread collapse of the market for indoor shopping malls. They aren't dead and gone everywhere, but "zombie malls" (and their fully-dead bretheren) are commonplace enough to merit their own fan sites. And while the nostalgia factor is significant, the costs to replace or renew those spaces is enormous: One indoor mall in Grand Island, Nebraska, is being demolished and reinvented for $250 million.
■ The appetite for physical "third places" -- neither home nor work, but someplace else -- is real. That is perhaps the case now more than ever, as terms like "epidemic of loneliness" find their way even into national-level policy-making.
■ Somewhere, somehow, a community looking to euthanize a "zombie mall" and recover something from the tax base sitting under all of that concrete ought to give a serious look at trying their own Harpa experiment. Reykjavik's lively community space is 300,000 square feet -- about half to one-third the common size of a once-prosperous American shopping mall.
■ The required physical conversion really might not be all that stark, considering that anchor stores were often intentionally built to put lots of open space under a single roof with few obstructions (just like a theater). It's really more a question of finding the legal and financial resources to take one of them out of "zombie" ownership, then installing imaginative, energetic management to make it a lively space not just some of the time, but all of the time. (And there's no reason such a space couldn't host plenty of money-making operations as vendors or as contractors.)
■ At least since the post-World War II boom, most of the innovation in public spaces has been left to private-sector ownership, and there will always be a place for money-making enterprises to attract new visitors. But the crash in the retail economy has left real physical scars on many communities, and only a Pollyanna would believe it's going to repair itself. Someplace ought to show itself the first to imaine what a great post-mall public space could become. If tiny, geographically isolated Iceland can do it, surely an American city with a similar population base and a good highway could do the same.
