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PANEL: CENTERS CALL ON TOWN-PLANNING SKILLS

BY DEBRA HAZEL

As open-air projects get bigger and more complex, their builders increasingly find themselves in the role of city planner, said speakers in a panel discussion on lifestyle centers.

“We really need to learn how to design public spaces, which we’ve forgotten in the United States,” said Yaromir Steiner, president of Columbus, Ohio–based Steiner & Associates, developer of the $300 million, 1.5 million-square-foot Easton Town Center, Columbus, and other New Urbanist projects. “We need to be like J.C. Nichols [developer of the landmark Country Club Plaza, Kansas City, Mo.]: renaissance developers.”

The creations of the lifestyle center and the larger town center are a return to the retail patterns of old, Steiner said. Before 1950, retail was a part of the urban landscape, “with everything on top of everything else,” he said. From 1950 to 1990, the development of strip centers and regional malls created zoned retail environments, separating retailers from residential districts and disconnecting them from the urban fabric.

Entertainment, too, was moved out of living areas as cinemas were brought into shopping centers, he noted. Since then, the challenge for developers has been to reintegrate all of those uses.

The result is the new town center, a format that is still being refined.

One who is celebrating the return to town centers is Giovanni Scotti, vice president of real estate at New York City–based Ann Taylor Stores Corp. “It’s a trip back to my roots,” Scotti said. “Growing up in Italy, the experience was the hangout at the piazza. You eat, you go to the movies.”

The women’s apparel chain started as a downtown village store in the 1950s, expanding into malls during the 1970s. Now, with 355 stores under the Ann Taylor, Ann Taylor Loft and Ann Taylor Outlet banners, the company is looking to other real estate formats to continue its expansion.

“Our new growth is really focused on the lifestyle center environment,” Scotti said, acknowledging that the term “lifestyle center” is loosely defined at the company.

“It’s a bigger trend than just a new product,” said Alan Billingsley, a vice president of the RREEF Funds, San Francisco, which was an early investor in the concept. “It’s trying to emulate [the old downtown].”

Most important is the center’s ambience, Billingsley said. “It needs to be experiential,” he said. “A lot of architecture is needed. There’s a certain nostalgia for them.”

Flexibility, also, is critical to success, said Steiner. Developers must remember that a building’s first use may not remain that for its entire life cycle, so the facility must be adaptable to other formats.

“We’re building buildings that can outlast their initial use,” Steiner said. “The building really has to carry itself.”

For all the new formats’ popularity among developers, there is plenty of life left in the old ones, panelists said.

“The lifestyle center is not going to kill the mall, but it is certainly having an impact,” said Billingsley. “It’s not going to kill the department store. They’re starting to revalidate themselves.”