ice climbing in dead malls

Imagine that the collapse of the global financial sector and the resulting dramatic decrease in consumer spending have caused scores of retail chain stores to declare bankruptcy. Malls everywhere are shuttered: a constellation of abandoned cathedrals to capitalism stitched across the American landscape.

And then imagine, as but one adaptive re-use, they are turned into ice-climbing clubhouses. Where people once gorged thousands of calories in one serving, people now burn those same calories in the Food Court. Where once the multi-carded and the debt-ridden found comfort in materialism, they may experience the same adrenalin rush from the prospect of multiple compound fracture, if not death. Where once they hopped from store to store in a zombie-like delirium, there, in a kind of Waldian introspection midway up a simulated glacier (a frozen New England lake geologically reconfigured?), they are now considering a fundamental alteration of their lifestyles, a change for the better.

Pruned

big box and infrastructure reuse

The problem of retail vacancies on this scale is so new that it hasn’t really been studied yet. Perhaps the only authority on the subject of empty big box stores is Oberlin College professor and artist Julia Christensen. She has spent the last seven years traveling around the country seeking out and documenting cases of communities reclaiming abandoned big boxes and putting them to a socially productive use–for instance, as museums, libraries, rec centers, and schools. She wrote about it all in her recently published book Big Box Reuse (MIT Press). A few days ago, we got her thoughts on how towns and cities can make beneficial use of these vacant structures and turn a hole in the local fabric into a community asset.

Infrastructurist