ALL THE BENEFITS OF SHOPPING DOWNTOWN, ONLY WITHOUT THE GOOD STUFF: I have a new bête noire, and I call it faux urbanism. As it turns out, developers have discovered that while people enjoy some aspects of cities, like having a diverse mix of shops next door to each other and being outside, not in a sterile mall enviroment, they don't so much like having to deal with city traffic, parking or, y'know, poor people in order to do so.
So, welcome to the "lifestyle retail and entertainment center". Take all your favorite mall destinations -- Old Navy, Bath & Body Works, etc., throw in a bunch of "eclectic" restaurants (Chili's, Don Pablo's), and place them on a fake "main street experience" in the back lot of a mall, with ample parking all around. Indeed, so much parking that no one can walk there from the nearest development, as if suburban shoppers would walk anywhere further than three blocks away in the first place. And put it as far away from an actual city as you can.
It's hard to describe the creepiness of these places without visiting one, but let me give one example: at a bookstore at one of these fake downtowns, a staffer told me the story of when Hillary Clinton came to the store to sign books. Well, there were protestors on the "street" in front of the store, bitching about this or that. Except that because it's not a real street -- it's all private property, even though it looks like a street and people can walk or drive along it -- they were able to have security remove these people to a far-off location so as not to disturb the carefully-arranged happy shopping mood.
Finally, these places are an insult to the real cities that inspire them. The one in suburban Maryland I visited was only a half-hour away from downtown Baltimore -- a real, trendy, vibrant, earthy city with all the shopping, culture and atmosphere you could ever want. The city of John Waters and Barry Levinson deserves better.
Faux urbanism is the Olestra of the commercial development world: sure, it may make you think you're experiencing the same thing as before, but boy do you feel sick afterwards . . . .
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