George's Promenade
Justin Scheer
In 1954, Northland Center, widely considered the first modern American shopping center, opened in a Detroit suburb. Northland hoped to address a lack of centralized commercial areas in the new sprawling suburban landscape. In the older, dense urban forms, downtown commercial spaces in the middle of population centers had reliable flows of consumer foot traffic, and were thus stable locales for brick-and-mortar stores, and for department stores in particular. But as the postwar milieu of suburbanizing impulses—think Robert Moses, Levitt and Sons, the General Motors streetcar conspiracy, the ascendent car-and-home-owning middle class—set off a mass exodus from urban centers to the developing peripheries, department stores hesitated to follow suit. There was no natural place for these businesses to go at the scale with which they had operated in the downtowns; shoppers in the suburbs were too diffuse. Suburbanites, for their part, were inconvenienced by the lack of a one-stop shop, lest they return to the city centers for their shopping. Malls, then, reconstituted city centers in the suburbs. After a wave of suburban diffusion, malls reconsolidated civic space, reproducing the downtowns as simulated, self-contained, miniature downtowns that were not lived in but driven to.
Urban malls like Providence Place, built in or very close to city centers, are a bit of a paradox, transplanting the hallmark of suburban infrastructure back into urban space. If American shopping malls tend to reconstitute city centers at the periphery, then it seems Providence Place reconstituted the city center in the middle of a city that already existed (one of the oldest in America, in fact), albeit a city whose downtown commercial district struggled to retain businesses before the mall’s construction.
So desperate to spur downtown economic activity were state and local governments that the Rhode Island legislature in 1995 approved a plan to let the mall’s developer, Dan Lugosch, keep $72 million in sales tax receipts, in addition to the $136 million in property tax relief approved by the Providence City Council. The state also donated the land on which the mall now sits. All of this was part of an effort to revitalize Downtown Providence during the “Providence Renaissance” of the late 1990s; other initiatives included the demolition of the Crawford Street Bridge (former record holder of World’s Widest Bridge) that concealed a quarter mile of the Providence River between the Downtown and College Hill areas.
Given local and state incentives, the mall is arguably as much a piece of public infrastructure as a private development venture. And as a kind of public infrastructure intended to revitalize the downtown, we can assume its relation with the broader urban form to have a certain obligation to civic (economic) interests. In particular, these are interests beyond and apart from the profit motives of the mall’s private developers and owners. It’s counterintuitive, then, that Providence Place, as the city and state’s prospective catalyst to downtown economic growth, ultimately took the form that it did: namely, a condensed and self-contained pseudo-downtown, whose critics fault it for being impenetrable to foot traffic (the vast majority of visitors park their car in the garage), and thus discontinuous with the preexisting downtown.
If America’s first wave of suburban malls reconsolidated the city’s peripheral space in simulated, microcosmic downtowns, Providence Place does much the same but as a reactive gesture to that first wave, one which participates intentionally in yet another reconsolidation of city space. If at first the urban dispersed radially and coalesced in a handful of suburban malls, Providence Place inverts and doubles this move by installing a miniature, simulated downtown in a preexisting downtown. Thus, by a curious logic of urban renewal — a logic that the subsequent decades of Downtown Providence economic change have ultimately neither proven nor refuted — the mall’s proponents imagined that a real life-force of a real commercial district would emanate out from the mall’s downtown simulacrum, despite the insular form it took.
This chronology of dispersion, consolidation, simulation, transplant, insulation, etc. describes a strange and complicated anatomy of the urban. And since shoppers constitute the urban body’s life-giving fluid, this chronology implies the construction of an image of the shopper. Viewed from above by the planners and designers, this image might look something like the one depicted in Harun Farocki’s 2001 documentary The Creators of the Shopping Worlds, a montage of planning discussions among mall architects and interior designers. For the creators in Creators, the shopper poses an engineering problem and is a raw resource to be optimally processed by a mall-machine. The designers squabble endlessly over the potential paths a shopper could take, the precise sequence of stimuli they receive, the subconscious association of values with certain products suggested by shelf organization, etc. — in short, how best and to what degree to determine the shopper’s stroll, its waypoints, its destinations. If the history of suburbanization, suburban malls, and the later urban malls renders a picture of the urban at a macro-level, then maybe a focused look at the processes and mechanics of the stroll adds some texture to that picture.