this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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Like the article says, I've heard a lot about this idea but it seems people keep pointing to that one mall in Rhode Island that got redeveloped as mini-apartments. I really wish this got more traction and implementation.
And it's not like local people don't want this. By and large, everyone agrees that dead malls are an eyesore and a waste of space and energy and money. Some people already take it upon their own initiative to try to make something of this, though currently, due to things like zoning laws making them hard to redevelop formally, the people who do take such initiative tend to be those who are left with no other choice in life -- i.e. the homeless, who find shelter there. Some people see homeless people with unkempt hair and unwashed clothing (and possibly mental disorders in addition) and get weirded out, but they really ought to adjust their thinking -- these weird-looking people are the pioneers, frankly, making use of a space that everyone else has just been leaving unused, for one reason or another. They're the ones going to spaces the rest of us won't go to, and making something of them. They're amazing and admirable, frankly.
Anyhow, regardless of people's opinions on the homeless, I think there's broad consensus that something does need to be done about dead and dying malls, and frankly there's also some quite reasonable concerns about building safety for poorly maintained infrastructure anyway. And I don't think there's anyone who doesn't complain about the cost of housing. So what we really need is to get people together to agree to solve this problem by providing more financially and environmentally sustainable solutions -- and mixed-use space for housing and business -- which would actually complement each other, one providing services and goods and the other providing a customer base -- is an excellent option for redevelopment, assuming the original building shell is still in decent condition.
Other larger abandoned buildings in cities here in Europe are often squatted by an active community and turned into alternative art and community centres. In some cases and usually after much struggle to not get evicted these places have also been legalized into quite nice places over the years. However if think the typical mall buildings with their lack of windows and other such problems are unlikely to be attractive for this.