It\’s hard to sit on the sidelines and read the dialogue about Hudson Yards and the recent Wall Street Journal story about declining traffic to the American Mall. I am delighted that the prescriptive solution of \”adding to the experience\” is finally getting debunked. Pixie Dust is not going to solve the problems of your local American shopping mall. Outside of the USA, the mall is doing just fine. Mostly because no one thinks MALL, they think ALL.

Convenience remains the driving force in modern consumption. Most of the world is more time poor than money poor. While the face of the world of consumption is changing, the body of the monster is intact. We eat, drink, clothe our children, enjoy vacations and recreate regularly. Our problem is that our shopping institutions are not evolving as fast as we are.

Mall Models

The American mall has never been a complete solution. No supermarket, no drug store, no locksmith, no doctor\’s offices, no gym, no daycare center, no library, no schools or public offices, no churches, and no housing, offices, much less hotels or god forbid, public transportation access. Shopping needs to connect with working and living.

Go to Japan, Sweden, Brazil and the All Mall is thriving. At Tokyo Midtown in Roppongi, the rents for housing and office space above the mall are higher because the convenience of a high-end supermarket on the bottom floor. Think about the Time Warner Center in New York City where a resident can shop Whole Foods in their bedroom slippers if they want to. For empty nesters migrating to New York City from their former family homes in Westchester, their choice of housing is strongly influenced by convenience of key services. How many snowbirds leave their New England or Midwestern homes in search of an easier life, and wake up one morning in the steamy heat of a south Florida summer missing their children, friends and familiar institutions. They might happily move back to their home towns – if they had an easy place to live. No snow to shovel, a covered garage, an easy supermarket to walk to, and a least a few services. That sunny apartment over the mall close to their old home might be the perfect solution. Florida is great four months a year, but the rest of the time we\’d rather be in Michigan.

Convenience Transcends Location

The mall\’s reinvention isn\’t just about housing. At Brookfield Place in Battery Park City, the office leasing brokers are talking about how the presence of a good mall, a great food court, movie theaters, a very elegant grocery store and easy access to both the subway and PATH affects the happiness of workers and thus the prosperity of tenant companies. Good for them. Leasing is a getting to a more creative place. Someone\’s willingness to, and happiness about putting in long hours is about the convenience of easily getting to and from work – but also what they can do along the way. If you work in Battery Park City, much less live there, putting in long hours is just easier surrounded by all the services and luxuries you could dream of.

Shopping Tourism

Tourism and shopping are 21st-century partners. Again, it is easy to point to off-shore examples of places that do it well. Look at Hudson Yards through Parisian eyes and ask some simple questions through the lens of the off-shore visitor. If English is not your primary language can you read the directional signage? At the restaurants, can you ask for the menu in Spanish, Portuguese, or Chinese? Are personal shopping services for tourists offered, or delivery available to the surrounding hotels? Is the mall showcased in the travel guides? What are the visiting children doing or being offered by the mall?? The answer to most of those questions is no. Shame on us.

Icarus Rising

American shopping companies are facing some very real and tough decisions. The transformation of aging property into a new ALL MALL takes time and money. Look at the surrounding landscape of crumbling parking asphalt and envision instead covered parking, high rise office and residential towers and interconnected, integrated big box stores. The time frame of planning, disruptive construction and repositioning is a minimum of three years. In an industry under pressure to deliver quarterly results to Wall Street and shareholders – that three years is a daunting transformation with the expenditure of piles of money and no guaranteed success on the other side. But it is the pathway to survival.

We need a better mix of public and private money, and that takes a level of sophistication and vision. For us in New York City, the shift in gravity from the Upper East Side to the Lower West Side started with Battery Park City. Amanda Burden, former Director of Urban Planning, William Whyte and others in the enlightened NYC planning community pulled off Battery Park City over a 20-year period. How come the world is so happy there, and not so pleased with what is happening a little farther upriver? In the latter case, form follows no function.

Edina, Minn. (pop. 51,000) is an unlikely spot to host the rebirth of the shopping center industry. This quiet and very upscale suburb is known mostly as an affluent bedroom community of Minneapolis, as well as for the garage charger gadgets residents use to jump-start their cars in the frigid Minnesota winters.

But Edina could very likely be the launch point for the next generation of shopping centers. Southdale Center, a Simon Properties center in Edina which opened in 1956 and bills itself as the \”oldest, fully enclosed, climate-controlled shopping mall in the U.S.,\” is an unlikely ground zero for shopping center transformation.

Yet this past spring, bubbling up beneath the maelstrom of store closings and retail hand-wringing, one of the most promising and even \”radical\” stories about the future of shopping centers emerged from Southdale.

In April, Simon announced a partnership with Life Time Fitness (not coincidentally based in nearby Chanhassen, MN) to transform a former J.C. Penney box at Southdale into a 120,000-square-foot \”athletic resort.\” Furthermore, in the words of Bahram Akradi, Life Time\’s iconoclastic Chairman and Founder, Southdale itself will be reconceived as a \”healthy lifestyle village where people shop, live, work, entertain, socialize and exercise, visit their doctor and relax at the spa.\”

A Healthy Mall: The New Paradigm

Akradi continued (and I italicize for emphasis): \”Our focus is to develop all-inclusive destinations that encompass the full spectrum of daily life for thousands of individuals, couples and families of all ages.\” Michael McCarty, Executive Vice President of Development Operations added, \”This project with Life Time is part of a larger vision for Southdale Center – to create a connected community epicenter. With new nearby apartments, the recently opened Hennepin County Service Center, a hotel coming soon, and this athletic resort on the way, Southdale is realizing that vision.\”

Note that nowhere in these announcements appears the word \”retail.\” Instead, the focus of the \”new Southdale\” will be on enhancing the health and well-being of its clientele and residents. And with two of the largest players in their respective industries (Simon is by far the largest shopping center REIT, and Life Time now occupies the #3 spot in the fitness sector) this is indeed a serious undertaking.

The new Life Time athletic resort is scheduled to open in early 2019. But I believe the larger story is the planned transformation of Southdale from a traditional retail-oriented center into a varied mixed-use community focused on the health and wellness of both its inhabitants and visitors.

A Lure for Millennials

There is a precedent for such a transformation, and it is quite possible that Liberty Center, a \”health and wellness\” mixed-use property developed by Steiner + Associates adjacent to a prominent Cincinnati medical center (which I reviewed in an earlier column link ), served as a model for the \”new Southdale.\” But in many ways, Liberty Center is a traditional retail-based development with additional space accorded to spiritually enhancing and wellness related activities.

The difference with Southdale is the incorporation of Akradi, a retail visionary, and Life Time Fitness into the wellness mix. I can report from firsthand experience that Life Time has transformed the old and very tired model of gym as workout space into gym as a family-based spa resort, including restaurants, salon services and physical therapy. In fact, Life Time members often settle in for the day – reading and working in the comfortably furnished lounge areas; sprawling in chaise lounges beside the Olympic size pools and enjoying a few moments of solitude while their children participate in spirited summer camps and a range of other youth-oriented activities.

As demonstrated by prior mall-to-mixed use conversions, the opportunity to live/work/relax in a single locale – without the need to continually start and restart the car – is a prime draw for millennials. Add the \”wellness factor\” to the mix and layer on a healthy and simplified lifestyle, and you have an irresistible draw for the 20-to-35 crowd.

So…keep your eyes on Edina. It could very well be a harbinger of transformation of the antiquated shopping center model (originally conceived in the early 1950s) into a living, breathing, healthful environment that\’s just right for 2020 and beyond.

It is becoming increasingly apparent that shopping centers need to provide stimulating, energized environments to lure consumers away from their computers and Amazon Prime accounts. There is nothing less engaging than a complex of sterile, half-empty common area rotundas and walkways with dreary soft rock soundtracks, antiseptic lounge areas and not a welcoming face in sight.

The time when shopping centers could serve as simple conduits to their retailers is gone. It’s not enough to provide ample parking, clean walkways and adequate lighting–although I’ve heard some senior industry executives maintain this is still the case. These same executives concede that the average store visits per mall trip have declined by roughly 50 percent over the past five years–from 6/7 to 2/3 stores per mall outing. Consumers have done their research online, and see the mall as a virtual fulfillment center for finalizing purchases and picking up merchandise they have already ordered.

Regrettably, the large majority of shopping centers continue to operate in passive mode–leaning on their retailers to engage and entertain their customers. But there is a growing awareness among the most savvy operators that the mall itself is a critical component of the shopping experience. Engaging customers in an entertaining and emotionally fulfilling visit will bring them to the mall more frequently and keep them there longer.

What constitutes an outstanding shopping center experience? Here are four breakthrough trends which demonstrate how some shopping centers are transforming into experiential destinations in their own right, together with outstanding examples of each. Many of these concepts have been pioneered in global markets before finding their way to the U.S. retail landscape. But they are definitely on their way.

1. Transcendent Customer Attractions

Entertainment is no longer a mall amenity–it is now a necessity. The most successful entertainment initiatives incorporate over-the-top attractions which generate substantial word-of-mouth and energize the entire mall environment.While these innovations typically require a significant up-front investment by the developer, they often can recover their initial cost many times over by boosting overall customer traffic and dwell time, while in some cases benefiting from hefty admission charges.

• Ski Dubai Snow Park

A 240,000 square-foot indoor ski village completely housed within the gargantuan Mall of the Emirates operated by Majid al Futtaim in Dubai. Initially designed as a traffic-building attraction for the mall, Ski Dubai has become a major profit center in its own right, with an admission charge of over $500 for a family of four. MAF has also positioned the snow park as the centerpiece of a high-end restaurant hall, with several full-service establishments overlooking the slope. The outcome: Mall of the Emirates is one of the leading family entertainment destinations in Dubai, exponentially boosting customer traffic, time spent in the mall, and number of store visits.

• Chi K11 Art Space, Shanghai

China has been a leading innovator in the incorporation of cultural institutions within major urban shopping centers. One of the most striking is the “Chi K11 Art Space” which has become a primary attraction at Shanghai’s “K11 Art Mall,” where it is a key differentiator for the mall within the highly competitive Shanghai shopping arena. K11 brands itself as an “art playground where culture, entertainment, shopping and living (in that order) revolve around art.” Chi K11 is listed as one of the top 10 museums in Shanghai, and its professionally curated exhibits communicate an aura of high culture and sensibility to the overall mall experience. K11 Art Mall engages its visitors in a compelling sensory and commercial experience–far beyond their actual shopping itineraries.

2. Personalized Concierge & Shopping Services

The common perception of a shopping center concierge station is two or three bored-looking employees sitting motionless behind an enclosed counter. Increasingly, however, forward-thinking mall developers are utilizing personal shopping services to help their consumers curate the diverse range of mall offerings to meet their specific interests and tastes.

A prime example of this trend is the Personal Shopper Service at South Coast Plaza, Costa Mesa, CA. It is ironic that South Coast Plaza, one of the largest malls on the West Coast with over 250 retail tenants and $1.5 billion in sales, has transformed that woebegone perception by installing a team of personal stylists available to any of its customers for wardrobe selection and image consultation.

No doubt SCP, owned by the Segerstrom family, has the ideal customer base for such a service: It’s the highest grossing luxury mall in California, located in the heart of coastal Orange County. But its Personal Shopper Service represents the type of large-scale investment in staffing, training and physical housing that most developers, even the largest, have been reluctant to commit. And yet the SCP Personal Shopper Service and related concierge services (i.e., restaurant reservations and tickets to the adjacent arts center) have contributed significantly to the center’s remarkable productivity as well as its competitive advantage within the affluent, international Southern California luxury retail marketplace.

3. Connection Within an Iconic Locale

Urban shopping centers often have the distinct advantage of being near or adjacent to historic buildings and institutions. Two of the most forward-thinking developers have effectively synthesized a dramatic connection with their iconic neighbors:

• The Grove L.A.

This legendary L.A. marketplace speaks “experience” so effectively that it’s a wonder its founding concept has rarely been duplicated. The Grove, owned by Caruso Affiliated, was constructed 12 years ago alongside the L.A. Farmers Market, together with an internal trolley system linking the complex with the market. The mall was thus able to capitalize on one of L.A.’s most treasured community institutions, as well as the aura of authenticity surrounding the market. At the same time, The Grove enhances the neighborhood with a vibrant open-air structure (not an enclosed mall!) built around a central plaza featuring choreographed water fountain shows. In the process, The Grove has become a community in and of itself.

• Westfield World Trade Center

There can be no more iconic location than lower Manhattan’s World Trade Center site. This 365,000 square-foot mall, opened in August 2016, is enhanced by a soaring cathedral-like ceiling which conveys a unique sense of spirituality and ethereality. The structure, known as the Oculus, connects on an emotional level with the adjacent World Trade Center Memorial site. From a practical standpoint, Westfield WTC connects seamlessly with one of New York’s largest transit hubs as well as the adjacent Brookfield Place mall in Battery Park City. And its tastefully curated assortment of retail and restaurant components maintains a level of dignity appropriate to its sacred locale.

4. Coordinated Mall-Wide Customer Service Initiatives

It is not always necessary or possible to create a high-profile entertainment experience to deliver an elevated level of customer service. In fact, even smaller and mid-sized centers can significantly up their customer service game by coordinating their own consumer outreach initiatives with those of their retailers.

A sterling example is located in the far reaches of Eastern Canada: Halifax Centre, Nova Scotia has developed a fully evolved customer service program in collaboration with its retail tenants. Titled the “Together We’re More” Program, the center has engaged its retailers in an ongoing initiative designed to maximize customer service throughout the property. Mall representatives participate together with retail sales specialists in training workshops focusing on world-class customer service techniques. Over half of the center’s 150 tenants take part in the program, which has produced overall productivity increases of up to 20 percent for participating retailers.

Halifax Shopping Centre demonstrates that even properties with modest budgets can significantly lift the bar on delivering a highly personalized level of customer service. And the concept is really very simple: shopping centers, while essentially real estate constructions, can easily leverage the intrinsic customer service expertise of their retail tenants to provide their customers with a fully coordinated, world-class shopping experience.

Fort Worth is Texas’s best-kept secret. In the shadow of Dallas, its more prominent neighbor, it sits quietly with an elegant downtown containing good retail, interesting restaurants and some very well-respected small museums. It is a community of what passes in Texas as old money. “Dynasty” and “Dallas” could have been titled differently, but the Ft. Worth locals are probably happy that Hollywood made Dallas the star. Said differently, Ft. Worth is more about the stock show than wildcatting, or in plainer language—cows, not Texas crude oil. Down the street from my Fort Worth hotel is a miniature copy of the Flatiron building, ironically sited around the corner from my New York office. The residential Flatiron replica with its cool factor adds to my thesis that what makes a city relevant in 2017 is the willingness of hipsters to live in it. Which is why I still have faith in Detroit: Urban density also breeds innovation, and renewal.

Site-Specific

Ten minutes from downtown is a successful experiment that deserves our attention: La Gran Plaza, the 200+ store repositioned shopping mall. Built in 1961 and then bought and repositioned in 2004-05 as a noble experiment. With the exception of the Ross Store, The Burlington Coat Factory and maybe Bealls, the rest of the tenants are unrecognizable to mainstream America. This is a mall for the Latin market: cowboy hats, bling, Quinceanera sweet-16 party dresses, tax services, money transfer companies, a branch of the county health office, food, and much more are offered to a highly targeted customer. One of the older department store anchor spaces has been transformed into a Mercado of small stores, with genuine chain-link fencing for walls. A three-story children’s playground with slides dominates the central courtyard. The sounds, smells and broader offerings are laser-focused, and even on a late-morning Tuesday in January there was a buzz. On the surrounding pad are a Fiesta Supermarket and a 90,000 square-foot office tower the mall is working on redeveloping.

When La Gran Plaza opened in 2005, it had its own mariachi band that marched in local parades as a PR/promotional face for the mall. Today the mall is now home to a mariachi school for both adults and kids, performing well-attended weekly concerts. Latin pop stars visit and there are what Anglos might call “tea dances” in the afternoons. The mall draws a mix from a 50-mile radius that is about 80 percent Latinos and 20 percent voyeurs visiting as much for the food and entertainment as they are for the shopping. La Gran Plaza is a family place. When I visited the mall years ago when it opened, it was the first place I’d seen family bathrooms with adult and kiddie toilets sitting next to each other.

Focused Power

The marketing manager I talked to at the Plaza claims it has the largest social media presence of any mall in the Dallas/Fort Worth market. My favorite social media engine is an old Air Force training jet parked in the concourse, a convenient stage for family selfies. What is so brilliant about the leaders behind the Plaza is that this is a targeted mall. It doesn’t try to pretend to be anything other than authentic. It is not after the Neiman Marcus customer. It is not even after the Macy’s customer. It has identified an underserved market and captured it. And it’s working. Its distinction is that the mall’s traffic counters have logged year-to-year increases of five to six percent across the past decade. How many properties can report that?

Decline and Fall

The Robin Report has systematically reported that a core of several hundred A-Malls will continue to prosper. It is the B and C malls that are deeply troubled. This problem isn’t unexpectedly new. Fifteen years ago, as I worked on my second book, Call of the Mall, I visited struggling shopping malls all across the country. From Hendersonville, NC to Palisades, NJ, the properties that sizzled in 1990 were breathtakingly empty in 2002. The critics loved it, but the book sold modestly. It was translated into 14 languages and sat on shelves and gathered dust. Sadly, it could be reissued today with few modifications. So what have malls been doing, or rather not doing, for the past 15 years? They had plenty of opportunity and runway to make changes. But they didn’t.

Blaming the recession and the internet are just contemporary excuses. The real wounds to the American shopping mall are not from external forces, but rather are self-inflicted.

Some observations:

• There is the problem with a sea of sameness. Is it possible to be teleported into a mall and actually know where you are? The cookie-cutter stores, concourses, palm trees and food courts—they all look the same from the inside.
• Landlords worshipped at the altar of the anchor tenants and created the climate for the birth of category killers that left the mall both for cheaper and friendlier real estate. Can you think of an American mall where you could buy both a book and a baseball, much less a half-gallon of ice cream?
• In 1995, a landlord was much more comfortable renting to a national than a local tenant. The national was ready to pay more money and sign a longer lease.
• Malls were built on borrowed money. The banks liked to see names they recognized on the tenant roster. The large shopping mall companies were more answerable to the banks than responding to the shopping needs of the public.
• The developers understood, even as early as the 1980s, that a mall was no longer being built to serve a new market, but rather to compete in an existing market by being closer, bigger and newer.
• In 2017, we are awash in tired and badly aging B and C malls. All of them are as clunky and unattractive as they were the day they opened. Is the solution dynamite? The truth is that some of them deserve to get blown up.

Rising from the Ashes

Some lower-tier malls remain ripe for reinvention, and at La Gran Plaza we have a blueprint for the building blocks to reinvention.

At the Plaza you can get a lot of stuff done. A three-generation family can come for an entire afternoon. Grandma and kids go to the concert and watch the teenagers dancing. Mom can get her weekly shopping done and Dad can deal with the nuts and bolts of living with tax preparers, insurance brokers, and money transfer agents. The eating choices are targeted to their tastes and wallets. No Wendy’s, no Pizza Hut; just local providers making distinctive, rotating fare. You want chili-flavored ice cream? You got it.

When you target the right customers, give them what they want and provide a meaningful experience, your draw can be 50-plus miles.

• Eating is something we can’t do online. Recognize that a great food court or well-curated restaurant mix drives traffic. Barfield Place in New York is an excellent example of a curated selection of local food offerings in a food hall setting that serves its market very well.
• Shopping mixed with music and dancing: why not? You can have drug-free early morning dance party raves as a cheap and enjoyable alternative to a gym aerobics class? Who doesn’t like to move or watch other people move?
• Providing the proverbial treasure hunt of possibilities that are curated for a specific customer base is failsafe.

So what do troubled malls do when they need help? Sure, they can change the layout, the cosmetics and the store mix. But the real question is, do they have the courage to be different and try a fresh approach? Do they really know their customers? Can they repurpose these aging, irrelevant shopping centers into vibrant, dynamic communities catering to a specific customer base? I say, visit La Gran on a Saturday afternoon and just feel the vibe.

I do not believe for one minute that the mall is dead. Yes, the 75-year-old concept of a “big box with lots of smaller boxes inside” is surely headed in the direction of the buggy whip. Consumers simply do not have the inclination or time to navigate foreboding parking lots and antiseptic walkways to then wait in a check-out line to complete their purchase with a harried store clerk (né salesperson).

Yet there is a dramatic and exciting new future for shopping centers . . . and the signs of the “mall of the future” are becoming more abundant with each passing week. These new properties are living, breathing communities—where retail takes its place alongside trendy, upscale eateries, sprawling green spaces, compelling entertainment and recreational facilities—and even spiritual hideaways.

Actually, these developments are not really “shopping centers” at all. They are, in real estate parlance, “mixed use” environments incorporating residential apartments, commercial offices and health and wellness facilities. They may also include spiritual and wellness aspects, and frequently offer in-development transportation options as well as mass transit links to urban centers.

In fact, the new malls resemble complete neighborhoods, often transforming deteriorating suburban and urban settings into vibrant downtown cores. The common denominator is “engagement”—linking to the larger community through a complex matrix of emotional, physical and sensory ties—and providing the opportunity to shop a carefully curated selection of compelling retail options.

Very often, the driver behind such “vibrant centers” is the sudden departure of a legacy anchor … a faded department store or big-box retailer. The vacancy actually provides an opportunity to transform a large and geometrically uniform space into a compelling environment … say, a contemporary food hall or luxury theater replete with fine dining and lounge seating. In some cases, the exit of a historic anchor propels a complete redevelopment of the entire mall, literally tearing down the walls and opening-up the entire property to the larger community.

Here are five key trends in the “neighborhood-ization” of shopping centers, together with prime examples of each:

1. Converting an Enclosed Mall into an Open-Plan Neighborhood

All or part of the original mall is demolished and replaced with a street-grid structure which fits more coherently into the surrounding community. That structure is then filled with attractive living, working and recreational options in addition to retail—along with seamless connections to regional transit.

Landmark Mall – Alexandria, VA

Earlier this year, Howard Hughes Corp. announced plans to redevelop an 11.4-acre Macy’s box and adjacent parking lot, and to transform this “big box” mall into an open-air, mixed-use project incorporating retail, residential and entertainment uses. The new development will also feature multiple plazas and green spaces, outdoor seating, an updated transit center and luxury cinema. “Our vision is to revive the site and create a new urban hub on the west end of Alexandria,” the company stated. And the City of Alexandria is providing full-fledged cooperation and support.

Belmar – Lakewood, CO

Rising out of the ashes of a vacant enclosed mall, Belmar was conceived as a “new downtown” center for this thriving Denver suburb. The old mall was torn down and replaced with an entirely new 22-block mixed-use development featuring an engaging selection of retail options, upscale eateries, art galleries and live music—together with a complement of new residential living options. In the process, Belmar has reestablished Lakewood as a vibrant living, shopping and working environment, home to more than 2,000 residents and another 4,000 within walking distance. Its developer, Starwood Retail Partners, recently added hospitality to the mix with a new Hyatt House Hotel.

2. Establish a Unique Bond to the Community

The center is imbued with an emotional and physical connection to the surrounding community, incorporating elements of health, spirituality and wellness into the overall commercial scheme.

Liberty Center – Cincinnati, OH

A fully integrated lifestyle community created from the ground up by Steiner + Associates and Bucksbaum Retail Properties on the perimeter of Cincinnati. Liberty Center, adjacent to a premier medical complex, focuses on health and wellness as its predominant theme. In addition to a broad complement of retail and dining offerings, the development incorporates a range of community gathering spots and social settings; parks and themed outdoor spaces; a Children’s Discovery Center, band shell; and spiritual amenities such as a chapel and meditation space. In addition, the Liberty Center offers an array of health and wellness initiatives directed by the nearby Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center and other health care providers.

3. Create a “Shopping Center of Food”

An enclosed mall is reconceived as a “food hall” with a warehouse setting featuring an eclectic and high-energy assortment of indigenous restauranteurs, food, coffee and wine purveyors. While retail is present, it is secondary to the food experience.

– Union Market District – Washington, DC

The “Union Market District” development created by Edens, Inc., has sparked the revival of a formerly faded industrial area of Northeast Washington, now redubbed “NoMa.” Union Market focuses on a highly localized assortment of restaurants, indoor/outdoor cafes and specialty food shops, including some purveyors who have been in the neighborhood for close to a century. The buzz surrounding Union Market has resulted in a re-discovery of NoMa, and a bevy of new residential and commercial developments in the neighborhood.

4. Revitalize a Major Downtown Urban Center

A redesigned center provides the commercial impetus to revivify a languishing downtown shopping district into a hub of civic activity, attracting new residents, corporate office tenants and a broad range of hospitality options.

– FIGat7th – Los Angeles, CA

In 2010 Brookfield Property Partners set out to breathe new life into an ailing 1980s-era shopping center it acquired in downtown Los Angeles. Rather than simply repackage a typical big-box mall, Brookfield redeveloped into a diverse and engaging open-air structure that, together with the nearby “L.A. Live” entertainment complex, has helped to transform Downtown L.A. into a cultural, dining and shopping hub with a broad range of new residential and workplace options. As a result, the Downtown L.A. market has become the kind of “live, work, play” environment that appeals strongly to millennials— coincidentally the prime target audience for FIGat7th.

5. Serve as a Cultural Resource

An urban shopping center establishes its position as the primary showplace for art exhibits, concerts, museum programs and other valued cultural activities.

– Parkview Green – Beijing, China

Parkview Green is one of China’s most dramatic mixed-use developments, enclosed in a transparent, pyramid-shaped structure that keeps out pollution and regulates the interior climate. A primary component of Parkview Green is the “Museum of Contemporary Art,” which is a primary attraction in its four-level shopping center. The gallery is dedicated both to exhibiting contemporary art works in China and to the discovery of emerging artists, and to “promote dialogue and communication in art.” In a city of over 20 million inhabitants with relatively few cultural options, the museum constitutes a primary cultural resource—and, not incidentally, a substantial draw for the mall itself.

– Santafé Mall – Medellin, Colombia

In an effort to set itself apart from the competition and make its expansive main plaza more welcoming, Santafé, a six-level enclosed mall, began holding regular large-scale events in the plaza shortly after it opened in 2010. The events, which are produced in-house and change every two months, have become so successful over time that the mall now charges a minimal admission price. (Visitors who spend a certain amount at the mall gain free admission to the events.) As a result, Santafé has become Medellin’s highest-grossing mall and one of its primary cultural and entertainment venues.