In any ecosystem, species either evolve or vanish. And in some parts of the country, shuttered malls are mutating into developments rarely seen in suburbia: compact, well-planned, walkable communities with a dense mix of homes and small businesses. Ironically enough, malls, icons of a car-centric, fossil-fueled culture, could become the sites for smarter, greener places to live and work.
      -- "The De-Malling of America," OnEarth, Summer 2008

I've seen several new stories about redevelopment of abandoned malls and big-box stores, and so I thought this an opportune moment to follow up on Tim Folger's recent OnEarth report on this subject. 

Few things cast a pall over a suburban landscape as thoroughly as an abandoned retail behemoth. Often these buildings are left behind when giant retailers, like "hermit crabs from hell" in one blogger's parlance, outgrows the box it has in a given location and decides to build a new one somewhere across town. Each of the shopping strips radiating out from my city (Asheville, NC) is blighted by at least one of these abandoned shells -- an ugly building with darkened windows, stranded in the middle of two or three football-fields' worth of empty, increasingly weedy parking lot. Wherever I encounter these eyesores, they usually set me to ruminating darkly about heedless, profligate waste of land and a way of life that's unsustainable and all downhill from here.

Well, as Folger's article made clear, there are hopeful changes afoot. He described a growing trend: razing abandoned malls and redeveloping all that land as new "downtowns" built with smart-growth principles in mind -- walkability, population density, green spaces, all the qualities that 50 years of suburban expansion have leeched out of much of the American landscape. 

Another approach to reimagining old strip malls: renovative and revitalize them via architectural upgrades. Treehugger brought to our attention a contest -- thrown by Scottsdale, Arizona's Museum of Contemporary Art -- looking for an answer to the Valley of the Sun's surplus of dilapidated strip malls. From the "Flip A Strip" call for entries:

How we can reject numbness? How might we re-think and newly envision the potential of the Strip Mall (a building stock of which we have a cross-continental abundance)? With collective energy and creative design expertise, we know there are many ways to transcend the non-descript status quo of the Strip Mall—ways that are aesthetically compelling, economically feasible and communally smart. What models, complementary mixed-usages and social experiences might result? This project hopes to inspire city planners, developers and entrepreneurs here and elsewhere.

Inspiring, no? Winners have been announced; I know that after a virtual stroll through the finalists' entries I for one won't again see declining or abandoned malls and big-box stores as dead ends.

Finally, NPR aired a story on Monday about the work artist Julia Christensen has done cataloging imaginative reuse of big-box buildings around the country. Christensen's new book Big Box Reuse (MIT Press, November 2008) describes how 10 cities turned "vacated Wal-Marts and Kmarts into something else: a church, a library, a school, a medical center, a courthouse, a recreation center, a museum, or other more civic-minded structures. In each case, what was once a shopping destination becomes a center of community life." Sounds like a great and positive book, and the NPR report is certainly worth a listen.

UPDATE, 11/17: Kaid Benfield's got a really good post up on big box recycling that touches on Christensen's work.