The 1980s are long gone, and the decade’s most iconic hangouts are disappearing now too: shopping malls.

Turn on practically any teen-infused movie from the 1980s and at least one scene is likely to take place at a bustling shopping mall. The shopping mall was the Facebook of its day: after school or on the weekends, suburban teens flocked to malls to connect with each other. They would play arcade games, eat greasy mall food and browse sale racks, too. Adults flocked to malls too, for shopping, movies and to sit in those vibrating Brookstone chairs they would never buy.

But now, shopping malls are disappearing at such a rapid rate that there’s a Web site that lists “dead” shopping malls around the country. According to Amy Merrick for the New Yorker, some of the abandoned shopping malls have been converted into “community colleges, corporate headquarters, or churches.”

Some malls are being shut down because they’re health hazards, with water damage, mold, even asbestos. One thing though is increasingly clear: Shopping malls aren’t what they used to be. “In January, Rick Caruso, the C.E.O. of Caruso Affiliated, one of the largest privately held American real-estate companies, stood on a stage at the Javits Center, in New York, and forecast the demise of the traditional mall,” reports Merrick. Caruso said: “Within ten to fifteen years, the typical U.S. mall, unless it is completely reinvented, will be a historical anachronism—a sixty-year aberration that no longer meets the public’s needs, the retailers’ needs, or the community’s needs.”

Internet sales have taken a chunk out of mall sales, but not as much as you might think. Online sales hit six percent of total retail spending in the 4^th quarter of 2013—a number that’s nearly doubled since 2006, explains Merrick. “Some retailers, understandably, are responding by focusing more on the online end of the retail business. Gap, which became synonymous with the American mall, is no longer counting on malls for growth.” Glenn Murphy, Gap’s C.E.O., told Merrick that its business is moving towards digital sales. “Mall traffic, for a number of years, has been slowing down. Whether it continues to decline somewhat over time, I think that’s realistic to assume.”

Even the iconic food court brands are struggling, reports Merrick. “Sbarro, which represents one of the four food groups of mall cuisine, along with Jamba Juice, Panda Express, and Cinnabon, filed for bankruptcy protection for the second time in three years. Court papers cited an “unprecedented decline in mall traffic,” meaning fewer hungry shoppers settling for foldable pizza slices.”

The suburban town square—shopping malls were the heart of many American communities. And all malls aren’t disappearing. The outdoor mall concept is thriving in some cities—making shoppers feel more like they’re doing something by being outdoors, rather than contained inside a stuffy building. But they only represent a small fraction of malls, the rest of which, it seems, have seen their prime—all while Amazon Prime gains momentum.

Find Jill on Twitter @jillettinger

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Image: Nicholas Eckhart

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With millions moving from suburbs and rural areas into big cities, we’ll need creativity and innovation to sustainably manage rapid urban growth and revitalize flagging suburbs.

Forget paying for gas, mowing the lawn or spending hours of your week commuting to a faraway job. Why bother with all of that when you could hop on a bus or train at a moment’s notice, walk to the corner store, enjoy beautifully landscaped public parks and have all of the entertainment and culture you could wish for, right outside your door? There are plenty of good reasons why cities are looking so attractive, especially to youths who grew up in car-centric suburbs. But as cities begin to groan under the weight of all these new residents, the rising popularity of urban life begs the question: is rapid urbanization really a good thing? Can we manage the growth of cities sustainably, while maintaining all of the benefits?

Growing Pains

For years, urban advocates and economists have predicted that the trend of moving from cities to suburbs was about to reverse, and in a big way. The 2010 Census seemed to prove these predictions overblown, with suburbs continuing to grow while urban populations generally stayed about the same. But there was one notable trend: an increase in residential growth in city cores. The New York Times reported in November 2011 that, for the first time in decades, the number of people moving to New York City was higher than the number of people moving out.

Outside America, the trend is definitely picking up steam. In 2008, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population was living in cities. By 2030, this number is expected to reach nearly 5 billion – and a lot of this growth will take place in smaller cities and towns that aren’t quite prepared for such a huge influx of new residents.

Heavily populated cities have a long list of both positive and negative impacts on the economy, the environment and human well-being. Cities enable people to give up personal vehicles in favor of buses, trains, subways and bicycles. Vertical housing uses fewer resources and takes up less land, making it far more efficient than unnecessarily large single-family homes. Walkability means people living in cities may get more exercise than their suburban counterparts. And when more people live in urban centers, more of the surrounding land can be preserved for agriculture, recreational green spaces and protected tracts of natural landscape.

But within each of those cities is seemingly endless streams of greenhouse gas emissions, congested streets, lack of affordable housing and a whole lot of trash, sewage and other forms of waste. Large urban populations put a worrying strain on local resources like water and electricity, and all that concrete leads to the urban heat island effect, contributing further to climate change. As cities grow, they tend to swallow vast amounts of land, with suburbs pushing ever outward. And though a thriving city is a major economic hub, offering lots of jobs, it’s also difficult and expensive to maintain, with many smaller cities going through extremely painful growth spurts as they try to adjust to rising populations.

Suburban Ghost Towns

The suburbs and exurbs that swelled with domestic promise thanks to the rise of affordable automobiles in post-World War II America are losing their gleam. Sprawling upper-middle-class neighborhoods filled with identical McMansions seemed like a great idea back in the early to mid-00’s, and with many people willing to commute longer to their jobs in order to achieve the suburban American dream, developers built them further and further from city centers. Today, many of these exurbs are nearly deserted, their formerly pristine lawns brown and overgrown. These housing developments, often located in otherwise rural areas, tend to be fairly isolated from commercial areas, requiring residents to drive many miles just to reach a grocery store. And when gas prices inevitably fluctuate, these exurban developments can seem more impractical than ever.

Take a look around nearly any suburb or exurb in the United States and you’ll see one sign of a cultural shift that will only worsen in the coming years: empty big-box stores. These cheap, poorly-constructed, aesthetically unpleasing metal boxes left behind by Walmart, Best Buy, Circuit City and other retail chains are hard to convert for other uses, so that they’re either knocked down and sent to landfills or simply sit vacant for years on end.

“We have long seen signs that the suburbs are unsustainable in their current form – in many senses, they were designed to be,” says Kurt Kohlstedt, founder and editor-in-chief of WebUrbanist.com. “Meandering roads are not conducive to transportation. A lack of sidewalks around shopping centers curbs walking. Suburban plots of land are too big to promote community but too small to sustain agricultural conversion.”

Some experts have predicted that if the middle class does actually abandon the suburbs in favor of cities, these neighborhoods will be left to blight. An Australian study concluded that high gas prices could turn car-dependent suburbs into slums, and many suburbs are now more likely to be home to minorities as white youth flock back to cities. It’s all too easy to imagine suburbs falling prey to poverty as their populations are cut off from the opportunities that cities can provide.

The Green Cities of the Future

If expanding cities are inevitable, what can we do to make them more sustainable? Designers, architects, urban planners, economists and other thought leaders around the world are already dreaming up solutions that range from imminently achievable to pie-in-the-sky fantasies, turning cities into real-world laboratories that explore new systems using cutting-edge technologies.

Renowned physicist Geoffrey West acknowledges that urbanization is responsible for a slew of economic, environmental and social problems, but shifts the focus to a big positive: cities as innovation hot-spots. In Thinking Cities, a 20-minute documentary by Ericsson, West discusses the ways in which cities can become “vacuum cleaners or magnets” for human creativity.

In order to prevent the many problems raised by rapid urban growth, we’ll need funding and political support for new technologies that can help us update infrastructure, manage traffic, build more efficiently, manage water and power supplies and reduce waste. Vertical urban farms that harvest their own water, run on renewable energy, recycle their waste and provide a number of essential functions to their residents are just one of the dazzling possibilities on the table. Sustainability-minded architects, engineers and planners are already beginning to imagine how old structures can be adapted for new uses, and new ones can be built to provide the ideal balance of residential, commercial, agricultural and recreational space.

Sustainable Visions For Outmoded Suburbs

And what about the big-box stores, malls and other relics of a suburban lifestyle that may go extinct? Many are already being reused in amazingly creative ways, transforming into cathedrals, farms, artist communities, roller skating rinks and indoor kart-racing tracks. An abandoned Kmart in California was even turned into a Spam museum. Big Box Reuse, a book by Julia Christensen, gathers ideas from designers and architects that include building an entire town in a single parking lot, adapting a warehouse-style store to include windows and a light-filled courtyard and swapping out a big-box store’s roof for translucent skylights so plants can be grown inside.

Dwell’s Reburbia competition solicited solutions that would envision a new future for suburbs, with the winning entry transforming McMansions into biofilter water treatment plants. Another idea involves rezoning suburbs for commercial use, specifically geared toward communities of small businesses. Judge Jill Fehrenbacher of Inhabitat.com noted that this idea was “clearly the most practical, cost-effective and energy-efficient proposal submitted to Reburbia.” Incidentally, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) agrees with this overall sentiment, advocating more mixed land use and other changes to suburban zoning codes in order to handle urban growth.

Of course, when it comes to actually putting these ideas into practice, caution will be required to prevent a bunch of half-baked projects that will only add to the problems. And on a global scale, there’s no telling how radical visions of the future will be put into practice.

“Perhaps the most interesting question is how cities, suburbs and countryside will be reshaped in places like China and India where booming populations are most rapidly changing both physical and cultural landscapes,” notes Kohlstedt. “In China, for instance, the dominance of the state paves the way for massive redevelopment projects on a scale unknown to the West. This has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, it lends itself to economies of scale and rapid adaptation. On the other hand, it has also already led to entire ghost towns constructed from scratch then left eerily unoccupied.”

Photos: http2007, robertstinnett, vertical farm, dwell

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When it comes to abiding by Homeowner’s Association rules, one writer’s penchant for decor needs to be checked at the door.

My husband and I love to play on the brighter end of the color spectrum, or dash into any color at all. When we purchased our first home in 2010, we did just that. The kitchen, we painted yellow, the living room walls a dark sand and the office/guest room (originally our bedroom), a deep scarlet.

But we both wanted even more color. While our clothing colors of choice are most often black or gray, when it comes to our home we like to go polychromatic and wild – at times feral. Take for instance our sofa carved out of one piece of solid teak, a hanging produce “basket” that used to be a scale at a market in Peru. You get it, we like to be different.

When it comes to doors, I’m of the opinion that making a proper entrance matters as much as the colors you’re festooned in. The root of this is rooted in, well, a quest for rootlessness. When I left my hometown and began to travel literal miles instead of the literary ones I explored through travel memoirs, I went from being seen as a confident and outgoing explorer to a timid and shy outsider. It was an unfamiliar cloak and I’ve been trying to find something a bit more harmonious with the dichotomy I am from travel ever since.

Case in point? Our front door. In deciding what kind of entrance we wanted for our home, we set out to dictate the terms. We really wanted the first (and last) image of our home to leave everyone seeing red after having fallen in love with colorful doors while traveling.

Red – the color of passion, of life and death, of warmth, and in many cultures, of prosperity and joy. Red is creation and destruction. Red is not slinking into the background of life. Red means setting ourselves apart from a sea of bland doors and perhaps even bland lives behind those doors so neatly painted in our neighborhood.

Straddling the Wainscoting

As a first-generation American, my husband grew up navigating between Texas and Mexico, two very different worlds. His parents were once told by his school that they were doing an awful thing by raising their children bilingual. (When Kiko and his sisters tested better than their monolingual peers, the issue was finally dropped.)

As for me, the daughter of hippie parents who decided early on not to send their children to school, or even institute bedtimes, I was still, nevertheless, steered towards organized, suburban sports. I too, grew up caught between two worlds within the same culture.

The “Breastfeeding is Best” and “Home’s Cool; Homeschool” stickers that covered the bumper of my mom’s van made me and my siblings stand out amongst the rest of our friends. It’s funny, though, now that Kiko and I are older, how much we appreciate our unique childhoods. I guess what I’m saying is, the “weird” stuff, only serves to make us more interesting adults with a desire for broader color spectrums. To stand out is not a bad thing.

Board Rules

When we inquired about the red door, our homeowner’s association wouldn’t have it. All doors must be white, they said. Potted plants on the porch must not reach heights above the railings. Should we ever want a new screen door, it would have to be approved first.

So what do we do? Do we fight it? With so many battles in life, this one doesn’t seem like a big deal in the grand scheme of things. Plus, fighting this one small battle might bring attention to the fact that some of our plants creep up towards the ceiling, well above the sanctioned porch railing height.

We could just rebel, paint it anyway and retract by whitewashing the red when someone notices. Perhaps we’ll just paint the inside of the door red so that when anyone exits the house, they get a warm, passionate send-off.

In the meantime, I put two more coats of stark-white paint on the door to brighten things up. As I looked around the complex afterwards, I realized that most other doors seem to be painted off-white. I smiled to myself, and gave thanks to the universe for small victories and minor insurrections.

Images: writer’s own

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This is not the greenest sentiment I’ve ever expressed, but the fact is, I kind of hate nature.

Not all of nature, of course. I’m extremely fond of puppies and sunsets. I also like butterflies and broccoli rabe, but I have a really hard time with some of nature’s wilder and more aggressive life forms – especially when they make their way into my house. I live in an area that is suburban, bordering on rural, and for the past 20 years I have had an uneasy truce with the wildlife roaming around my sleepy country town. That truce has come to a sudden and violent end, thanks to a nasty encounter with a rabid raccoon. Now it feels like all-out war: me against the critters.

When I moved to the suburbs from New York City I naively expected to form a loving and Disney-ish relationships with the local animals. I thought there would be happy chipmunks frolicking on my lawn; I looked forward to gentle deer eating out of my hand, while bluebirds smiled indulgently from above, tra-la.

The reality has been far less benign. We have bear living in the woods near my house, treating our garbage cans like an all night smorgasbord. There have been many nights I’ve been kept awake by squirrels slam-dancing around in my attic, doing God knows what with my out of season clothes. We have had several ill-fated dinner parties, where my guests have pretended not to notice that mice were fragrantly decomposing behind the dining room walls.

Other wildlife encounters have been downright dangerous: we’ve seen coyotes skulking around during the day, looking like an ill-conceived cross between a house pet and Satan; mostly they come out at night to howl at the moon and snatch up the occasional dachshund. One summer we had an attack of yellow jackets, nasty invaders who took over my laundry room, reproducing like mad and gorging themselves on liquid Tide. But creepiest of all were the bats. During the day they were harmless but unwanted house guests, hanging by their skeevy little bat feet under the eaves of my porch. But at night they would fly away from the house in a perfect horror movie swarm, making lazy Transylvanian circles in the sky. I found the bats unnerving – I was afraid they would give me rabies, or one of those spooky vampiric conditions preteen girls are so fond of. But the bats turned out to be the least of my worries; the real threat came in the form of a woozy raccoon who planted himself Cujo-style on my front steps, lurching and hissing at my family until the police came and shot the poor sick thing.

It was a sad and dramatic scene, quickly followed by grim comedy – the police and the health department played a spirited game of “Not it” when it came to picking up the animal’s remains. The health department actually suggested I keep the raccoon in my refrigerator until they could send someone to collect it. You would have to know how insanely prissy I am about germs and odors and contamination to appreciate just how unlikely this scenario was: I won’t put raw chicken in my fridge without triple-wrapping it in plastic, and there are several varieties of cheese I won’t refrigerate because I find the smell unpleasant. The idea that I would store a bloody and decomposing rabid animal on the shelf next to my arugula amused my family beyond all reason. But since no one else would claim the carcass, my husband and son took it upon themselves to collect and bag the animal, thereby exposing themselves to all sorts of blood and saliva and cerebral fluid. They are now two-thirds of the way through a grueling series of rabies vaccines; they are sadder and wiser, and they can finally relate to my raging distrust of wildlife.

Meanwhile, I have begun to fantasize about leaving the suburbs altogether, packing up and moving to a tiny apartment on Manhattan’s upper West Side. I love the country, but it seems like rats and pigeons may be all the nature I can actually handle.

Editor’s Note: Susan Goldberg is a slightly lapsed treehugger. Although known to overuse paper products, she has the best of intentions – and a really small SUV. Catch her column, The Goldberg Variations, each week here at EcoSalon.

Image: Michael Scheltgen

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My parents moved from Nebraska to Hollywood in the fifties, having heard the land game was booming in the San Fernando Valley. My developer father built us a home on a cul-de-sac in the suburb of Woodland Hills. The valley was still rife with small farms, ranches, undisturbed orange groves and only a handful of strip malls. We even played in a bog – a gated open forest located right across the street from my low-slung Mediterranean manse.

Paradise was not yet lost. It was still lush and green and hopeful. It had a culture, distinguished by great pockets of open space in the rapidly built-up jungle. Somehow, Ahmanson Ranch was spared from a sub-division fate when Washington Mutual gave up the fight to develop the refuge in 2003 and it was sold to the state of California, preserving its undeveloped status as a natural park. It’s located near my brother’s home in the Hidden Hills, and he often explores it on horseback, encountering a rattler or coyote now and then.

But that kind of wilderness isn’t the norm. Uncorked commercial development and urban sprawl greatly changed the rural childhood picture as I knew it with grid-locked, smog-producing freeways linking inhabitants to three car garage homes with massive gas barbecues and pools, and mostly, endless monstrous retail centers in Tarzana, Reseda, Encino, Sherman Oaks, Van Nuys, Canoga Park and North Hollywood. Sure, there are canyons and mountains and open terrain, but usually it is visual experience with very little access.

Meantime, most cultural centers (museums, theater, concert halls) are located downtown in “the city” and you have to subject yourself to the stress of traveling there to show your children there is more to Los Angeles than markets, fast food joints, gas stations, nail salons, car washes and dry cleaners. The strip malls and shopping center are now the culture of the valley. And they beckon us to buy and use more than we need.

I think of this because my youngest daughter is housed up in the valley for a week, initiating her summer vacation and celebrating a well-deserved break from the strains of 5th grade. She is spending “quality time” with my family members who all still reside in the valley.

My mother, sister and brother are hard pressed to keep Lauren entertained. I guess their ages and the fact they are childless must be factored in. But I also believe it is the culture of the outdoors being dramatically outstaged by retail blight.

The other day, my mother dragged the kid with her on her errands to the market, the cleaners, the car wash, the gas station. I was dragged on errands too, but also driven to the beach on summer days when it took a mere 20 minutes to traverse the canyon in her station wagon to Zuma. It also took 20 minutes to get to Westwood or Century City or Beverly Hills, but cars have ruined it and now the hour commute is too much for my mom to handle most days. Mom also spent a few hours with Lauren at the local 20,000 sq-foot strip mall, The Commons, where they saw The Karate Kid and had a bite.

The Commons has become a common destination for my daughters when visiting grandma. Hey, you can keep up with the Kardashians who have a shop called Dash across the street. Ain’t that culture?

My brother took my daughter with him to look at properties and to the office. She likes to color, so being indoors for a few hours isn’t all that boring. After, he took her to lunch and to Nordstrom, where they bumped into my mother at the jewelry counter. It was a funny coincidence that I’m sure added some interest to the week. My sister, who is the most innovative in the group, did arrange a swim day for Lauren with a friend and her child at a pool with some kind of crazy water features.

Swimming has always filled the summer days of valley kids, but it was never enough for me and my cronies. We also spent countless hours exploring those open orange groves and various fields which were interspersed between the developments. We hopped on our bikes or cruised around on foot, never fearing some lunatic would snatch us up if we dared venture into the green without grown ups. At times, the destination was the only strip mall (Corbin Village) but along the way we picked oranges and pomegranates and stopped to climb trees.

Boredom is an okay thing for kids during the summer break. It stirs the imagination and makes them resourceful. Build a playhouse out of an old cardboard box. Play beauty shop in the pool. Build castles in the sand. Sew clothes for those Barbies out of rags.

Sometimes the down time from camps, vacations, Disneyland, parties and parades can be the most memorable time of your childhood. Only, when you are completely surrounded by commercialism during that down time – block after block after block of  stores and businesses, it can be hugely oppressive. It helps to have a little green. And I wish more remained.

I suppose the only upside, which is also a downside, is the recession’s effect on the strip mall – forcing many tenants to abandon their leases and close their businesses. As a builder’s daughter, I empathize with the loss of income from the vacancies. Everyone is hurting. But it makes me wonder if the behemoths could be replaced with absolutely nothing.

Raze the properties. Return the land. Leave it alone. This could restore the valley to a hopeful green place, again. Mom and dad believed development of the valley was the future. Lauren’s mom and dad believe it is now about creating more undeveloped space – the kind a kid on a bike can explore on a boring, summer day.

Images: front door, Calabasas Real Estate, ebay

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