Post-Retail Space

Stub note: This page was created during the ingest of Spatial therapies and requires fuller treatment as more sources on retail decline are ingested.

Definition

Post-retail space names the spatial condition produced by the restructuring of consumptive patterns: the shift of consumers to online shopping, declining overall consumption levels, and the move from physical to digital goods (including home 3-D printing). The result is "a large supply of underutilized commercial space in our urban landscape" — "an estimated one billion square feet of retail/commercial space… vacant in the United States alone, evidenced by environments marked by obsolete malls, big box stores, and strip shopping centers." Qureshi calls this "the emergence of a potential 'post-retail' reality," whose emblem is the "dead mall."

The concept has a before and an after. Before: Victor Gruen's regional shopping mall, "the Heart of the City," which "became a social center and cultural icon deeply ensconced in national identity via spatial form" — the retail environment as the very form of post-war social identity. After: Koolhaas's insistence, in the Project on the City Guide to Shopping, "that retail spaces remain profoundly important to the city despite the emergence of the 'dead mall' condition" — shopping as the essential means to understand urbanity. Between Gruen's heart and Koolhaas's diagnosis, the dead mall is the consumed-and-abandoned shell of consumerism's built form.

Interior architecture's role: the reinvigoration of obsolete retail space "can transcend simple adaptive reuse and inspire critical perspectives on social history and heritage" — transformations into civic, municipal, healthcare, and educational uses — with the proposed conversion of Sears Auto Centers into internet data centers as "the direct expression of the ongoing change from physical retail to digital activity": retail space becoming the infrastructure of the economy that displaced it.

Key Thinkers

• Ziad Qureshi — names the "post-retail" reality and assigns interior architecture its reinvention.
• Victor Gruen (discussed in the source, not yet paged — see log) — architect and social theorist of the regional shopping mall as "the Heart of the City" (The Heart of Our Cities, 1965).
• Rem Koolhaas — shopping as the means to understand urbanity (Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping, Project on the City II, 2002); the "dead mall" condition acknowledged within retail's continuing urban importance.

Related Concepts

• consumerism — the consumptive restructuring that produces the post-retail condition; the mall as post-war cultural icon "ensconced in national identity via spatial form."
• adaptive-reuse — the operative response: reuse "grounded in the shared history of the past, considering new needs with retrospective meaning."
• junkspace — the mall as Koolhaas's paradigmatic Junkspace; the dead mall as its terminal state.
• spatial-therapy — reinvention of retail scars as therapy for "a profound and critical change."
• urban-sprawl — the big-box and strip-center geography of the vacant stock (cf. Wassmer).
• terrain-vague — the post-retail shell as a commercial cousin of the post-industrial void.
• Automobile Vernacular — the car system's contribution to the vacant landscape: parking lots as Webb's "pressed metal deserts," targeted for elimination by the self-driving car.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

• Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — the post-retail reality, the billion-square-foot vacancy estimate, Gruen's mall, Koolhaas's shopping urbanism, the Sears-to-data-center conversion, and the adaptive-agency thesis.
• Big Box Retail Decentralization (Wassmer 2002) — complementary source: the fiscal and growth-control determinants of big-box retail location, the stock that post-retail reuse inherits.
• Inside out (Webb 2018) — the big-box shell destabilized in advance: SITE's Best Products project, the enclosed store volume "shifted sideways off its base, so that many of the items for sale displayed in the sales area find themselves out in the open" — the obsolescence the post-retail condition inherits was already rehearsed as image ("the ne plus ultra of architecture for disaster movies"). Webb's note 4 names the parking-lot landscape the "pressed metal deserts" that the self-driving car "has the potential for eliminating… more completely than ever the drive-in could."

Open Questions

• Is the post-retail condition an opportunity for interior architecture, or evidence that consumption has vacated physical space faster than design can re-inhabit it?
• Who funds the reinvention of a billion vacant square feet — and does "economical, sustainable, and historically contiguous" reuse survive contact with the real-estate economics of dead malls?
• Does converting retail into data centers (the Sears Auto Center case) count as the post-retail reinvention's triumph, or its bleakest reading — consumption's shells becoming the machine rooms of immaterial consumption?
• Webb's SITE reference shows retail instability rehearsed as image decades before the "dead mall" condition materialized: does the post-retail landscape arrive twice — first as disaster-movie representation, then as actual vacancy — and which one does interior architecture inherit?