Urban lifestyle plazas designed to replace shopping malls

Karie Bennett recalls selling a lot of lipstick in 2008.

Like everywhere during the recession, business was down at her Atelier Studio salon at Santana Row, an outdoor mall in San Jose, California. But even if they weren’t spending, people continued to come to the center to soak up the European atmosphere, stroll among the high-end shops and linger at the open-air cafes. And indulge in a small cosmetic luxury.

Santana Row offered a gathering place and sense of community, not just a place to shop, Bennett said.

Indeed, the Bay Area and communities across the country are embracing what has come to be known as the Santana Row effect — a nationwide planning trend that seeks to undo the great American enclosed mall and the cars that come with it.

The concept is city center developments. At the heart of each one generally is an Italian-style “piazza” or plaza, surrounded by open-air retail shops and restaurants, with mixed uses of either residential units above ground-floor retail, office spaces nearby, hotels, or even theaters.

In the Silicon Valley area, Mountain View’s will be completed next year, San Ramon brought in a renowned architect for its, and Santa Clara’s — approved in June — is going to be so big it needs to be completed in several phases over the next decade.

But San Jose’s is the model that everyone can’t help but mention.

On any given sunny day, the light reflects the warm colors of the building facades that sport balconies and stone arches on Santana Row. People stroll, sit and chat on benches, as faint, classical music streams from unseen speakers.

Bennett, who now owns two Atelier Studio salons at Santana Row, says the concept works because it provides a snippet of culture that can’t be re-created elsewhere.

“It takes a lot of money to enter the door at Disneyland, but it’s free to walk around here, enjoy the fountains and enjoy all the architecture,” said Bennett.

The concept of a city center is not exclusive to the Bay Area; city centers or “lifestyles centers” have been around for at least a decade and are popping up throughout the nation, said Chris Calott, a University of California at Berkeley professor of architecture who specializes in urbanism. But Santana Row, which opened in phases starting in 2002, was an early adopter of the model.

For years, city councils throughout the Bay Area have referred to Santana Row as the ideal when discussing plans or concepts for their own city centers. Part of the history of U.S. cities is for them to copy one another, especially successful traits, Calott said.

“They all want one,” Calott said.

This urbanist movement was a strong reaction against the suburban experience that America built some 50 years ago of a very car-dominated culture, Calott said. The city center has now become a mainstream real estate development, a “cure-all” by city municipalities.

In typical city centers, gone are the seas of parked cars in a large lot common outside of shopping malls or strip malls. Parking structures are hidden behind the centers, or absorbed into the structures themselves. People park their cars once, and then go on foot for the rest of their experience.

More than retail space

The centers, although they also hinge around consumerism, are more social. With a town square, they sometimes incorporate community events such as a farmers market, small concerts or festivals.

“It’s an instant town center for those who have either lost their historic core, or never had one,” Calott said.

This instant downtown is exactly what San Ramon is trying to accomplish.

Sunset Development, a company that built and owns a business park in San Ramon, is the force behind its much-anticipated city center, expected to open in 2018. It brought in one of the biggest names in architecture: Italian “starchitect” Renzo Piano — the architect who did San Francisco’s Academy of Sciences, the New York Times building and Paris’ Centre Georges Pompidou.

For San Ramon, Piano is creating a transparent structure filled with his signature all-glass facades around a one-acre piazza that incorporates green open space, with parking hidden away.

Although some may say it’s a glorified mall without a roof, the openness of the structure makes it feel as though there are no walls or a fortress on the outside, said Jeff Dodd, senior vice president of Sunset Development.

“We wanted a place to stand on its own,” Dodd said.

Santana Row was influenced in design by La Rambla, a street in Barcelona known as an outdoor pedestrian mall, said Chris Haegglund with BAR Architects, who helped design Santana Row. BAR Architects, based in San Francisco, will also be the local architect in aiding Piano’s firm with the San Ramon project.

Mountain View’s the Village at San Antonio Center also wanted to redesign the retail concept, said Community Development Director Randy Tsuda.

Its center, when completed at the end of 2017, will feature a public plaza, office buildings, retail, an eight-screen theater and a 167-room hotel.

Much like Santana Row, which demolished an old strip mall, the Village also went from an aging shopping center to mixed-use center.

“From a city perspective, it was an ideal location to allow more intensive development,” Tsuda said.

The area is conveniently close to public transportation. With so many amenities, the center is an area where people can spend lots of time. If it were just an office park, for example, at night the area would be empty, Tsuda said.

Other cities are expanding the city center concept into mega-projects. Santa Clara’s 9.7-million square-foot project will be built over 240 acres of city-owned land for a $6.5 billion development deal dubbed City Place. Plans include 5.7 million square feet of offices, 1.1 million square feet of retail, 700 hotel rooms, up to 1,680 apartments and a 35-acre park.

One reason Santana Row works is it “channels consumerism’s impulses into the creation of a living, breathing neighborhood,” wrote architecture critic Alan Hess critic, in 2007. It took away space from retail and gave it to people for parks, narrowing streets enough to slow down cars, he said. People became part of the action as they walked around, or sat at outdoor cafes, people-watching and taking it all in.

“Santana Row realizes that we want to be with our fellow humans for reasons other than selling or being sold to,” Hess said.