*An example of your typical shuttered strip mall* *from Rachel Quednau’s piece. (Source: Johnny Sanphillippo.)*

Back in 2016, Rachel Quednau wrote a piece in this space titled “Stuck with Strip Malls.” By “stuck with,” she meant that they will continue being built as long as our regulatory and financing systems incentivize them:

Until we change the government regulations that induce strip mall development (or until every strip mall fails completely), we're stuck with these low-returning investments in our towns and cities.

We’re also stuck with them in the literal sense: Thousands of these structures will remain a part of the built environment, whether or not we keep building or financing them. Many will probably fail as they’re currently constituted, especially given the ongoing growth of e-commerce. In affluent and growing regions, such as Northern Virginia where I live, it's common for older strip plazas to be torn down and redeveloped into mid-rise apartments or mixed-use centers. This type of development has its pros and cons; my own view on it is cautiously positive, as I explored here in Maryland’s affluent DC suburbs.

But are there ways for strip malls to be reinvented or reimagined in inexpensive, low-tech, incremental ways? Absolutely. We can see this process unfolding in many places. For example, take a look at this aging strip plaza in a more working-class community in Montgomery County, Maryland. Its anchor store, previously an Ames discount store (similar to a K-Mart), is now a cavernous thrift store. Its overbuilt parking lot, in a neighborhood where many residents do not own cars, now hosts a series of small businesses, from food trucks to produce sales to auto repair.

This is a very informal example, as the space has not been renovated or retrofitted in any way. In Falls Church, Virginia, there’s a somewhat more deliberate and more expensive example that still retains the strip mall form: Eden Center, a plaza home to dozens of Vietnamese restaurants, shops, and services, along with cultural events.

Eden Center is a huge attraction for Vietnamese Americans, as well as one of the most notable tourist attractions in the Northern Virginia suburbs. It has put the area on the map as a culinary and cultural center. (Businesses and restaurants from other Asian cultures, such as a Chinese hotpot restaurant and Korean barbecue restaurant are also tenants here.) While it might seem odd that a strip mall could house such culturally interesting stuff, that idea sells short the possibilities for these spaces.

Eden Center almost didn’t exist. Back in the 1980s, the strip plaza, opened in the early 1960s, was beginning to show its age. And at the same time, many Vietnamese Americans who had been displaced by DC Metro construction or rising rents further east ended up in Falls Church. Vacancies in the plaza beckoned, and little by little, the Vietnamese-American community opened businesses there until the place had a new identity. The company that owns the plaza became invested in the concept, and undertook architectural improvements, renovations, and expansions.

It’s sometimes suggested that this kind of thing has something to do with the fact the entrepreneurs involved are immigrants. There’s probably something to this, inasmuch as immigrants do start businesses at high rates, and many immigrants’ home countries have traditional built environments that they can draw on as a model for their approach to the American built environment. But to reduce this phenomenon to some notion of the magic of immigrants, or to view it as somehow “foreign,” would be wrong. The reality is that America’s centerless auto-oriented suburbs are the outlier and the oddity.

But, as noted, there are so many of these landscapes that they will survive in some fashion, no matter how much urbanist ideas take hold. On the one hand, strip malls and their associated built environments are poor investments. But on the other hand, they exist here and now. Strong Towns’ focus on incremental, small-scale development can be applied to them, too.

So what does Eden Center look like, and how has it subtly improved the functionality and productivity of the strip-plaza urban form? Here’s the view from above. Known as Seven Corners, this intersection is one of Northern Virginia’s busiest and most car-oriented areas.

*Eden Center, satellite view. (Source: Google Maps.)*

Back on the ground, start with parking. Parking at Eden Center is a pain. Even on weekdays, the lot is often jam-packed. On weekends, it can take 10 minutes of circling to find a spot, even at the far edge of the lot. It’s a pretty big parking lot. The reason it’s full is not because it’s too small, but because it’s being fully utilized. There are almost no vacancies in Eden Center, and there are over 125 businesses here, some of them quite small. The retail space and the parking lot are both being utilized to their maximum potential. This is what we might call “commercial density,” or a high concentration of independent productive enterprises.

*Parking lot at late morning on a weekday.*

The lot also doubles as an event space: there are drive-in movie nights, festivals, and other events. During the pandemic, many parking spots were even blocked off to install ample outdoor seating. That’s how desirable Eden Center is—it doesn’t need instant, ample parking to be a draw. Given the property’s fundamental auto orientation, this is what success looks like.

On your way in, you might see this gate, too.

The architecture, combined with the lack of vacancies and small storefront sizes, make the strip feel about as fine-grained and urban as a strip plaza can be.

*The main wing of Eden Center. There’s another wing to the left, and a large supermarket to the right.*

This fountain and set of benches makes for a pleasant place to enjoy some basic food or just sit for a bit. The plaza managers have noticed that people treat this huge retail center as a public, social space, and they’ve enhanced it to make that human tendency more comfortable. This is the opposite of “no loitering,” as if it were entirely natural to segregate shopping from other human activity.

*A cosmetic amenity and some seating turn the strip mall from a single-use, one-dimensional space into something more.*

Here’s a closer view of the fountain/seating area.

This might all look merely cosmetic, but it’s more than that. Yes, Eden Center is a single property, and yes, it’s mostly reliant on the car. But it draws its energy from an astonishing number of small businesses. It’s more broad-based and less fragile than a “downtown-style,” mixed-use development, or a standard strip plaza anchored by chains. And all together, its features change the look and feel of the place considerably. It’s a really unique use of a substandard form. It’s squeezing water from a stone. And it can be done elsewhere, too.

This isn’t going to be the fate of every strip mall, or even most of them. But it’s probably a lot more possible than it looks right now, and it suggests that the basic form can be utilized far more productively than it generally is.

If we’re stuck with these things, something like Eden Center is a pretty good way to be stuck.

(All images for this piece were provided by the author, unless otherwise noted.)

Eden Center: Is This Strip Mall Paradise?

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