The return of the Community Marketplace

The Stanley Marketplace in Aurora, east of Denver - adaptive reuse of commercial malls

by Gregory Saville

Adaptive-Reuse Community Marketplace:
A retail and cultural hub created by repurposing a former industrial, commercial, or civic structure into a multi-vendor market space. It functions as the modern Third-Places within revitalized buildings. 

It was the 1990s and we were sitting in an architect’s drafting room in Vancouver, pointing to some of our CPTED recommendations on a new suburban shopping mall south of the city. My business partner, Paul Wong, and I had spent weeks examining designs for the walkways, parking lots, store location placement, and other opportune crime areas. 

We believed this sprawling regional shopping mall might be redesigned with CPTED principles to make it safer. Paul had already co-published some of the first environmental criminology research with Pat and Paul Brantingham on the crime-causing character of shopping malls.

We had done our homework. Our recommendations were solid. We had the data to prove it. We were confident!

Then the figurative bomb exploded. 

“Nope,” said the architect hired to redevelop the property. 

He continued: “The property owners are going another direction. The suburban shopping mall concept is dying. There is a new kid in town. The Big Box store!”

“What?” I exclaimed. “What the hell is a Big Box store? That is a stupid idea. It will never take hold!”

Famous last words!

The Stanley Marketplace signals a traditional kind of community experience making a comeback

The emergence of the Big Box store changed everything. The saturation and decline destiny of the suburban shopping mall was set. By the 1990s, shopping malls began to fade. Some have termed the decline of malls as the retail apocalypse.

From a crime perspective, Big Boxes were not much better. They triggered more sprawl, monoculture and homogenization of land uses. They reduced public space walkability and drained life from local downtowns. Many small neighborhood stores closed. 

Twenty years later, especially following the 2008 recession, the pattern changed again. E-commerce expanded and consumer demand for large format buildings weakened. Today it is the Big Box apocalypse. Vacancies are rising and many appear to be following the same downward path of their suburban cousins. 

SHARED SPACES AND PUBLIC LIFE

Consumer behavior and retail land uses are changing demand. People still visit Box Stores for bargains, but many now shop online with home delivery. More people stay home and work digitally, yet many still want places where they can gather in safe, enjoyable communal settings.

Last week I visited the latest reincarnation of the mall. The Stanley Marketplace in Aurora, just east of Denver. It is one of a growing list of mixed-use, indoor/outdoor market-places called adaptive-reuse community marketplaces. 

The Stanley Marketplace opened in 2016 inside a former 1954 aircraft-parts factory. The building was repurposed into a 140,000 square foot (13,006.4 m² ) mixed-use marketplace that now hosts over fifty independent businesses.

Adaptive-reuse is an architectural strategy to repurpose older buildings, cut development waste, reduce carbon levels, and retain local history. It appears in residential buildings, office blocks, and increasingly in commercial markets.

Adaptive-reuse community marketplaces are a form of walkable, community-centered retail. They are human-scale, lively, and shaped more by local entrepreneurs than national chains. They return to the kind of economic and social embeddedness that suburban malls once promised but rarely achieved. 

Seattle's Pike Place Market - a popular adaptive reuse market, repurposed and saved from demolition - photo AlexReynolds at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wiki Commons

Early versions have existed for a long time, such as Pike Place Market in Seattle (1907) and the Fremantle Markets south of Perth, Australia (1897). Modern examples are appearing across many cities, including the Anaheim Packing House in California (2014), the Broadway Market in Baltimore near the harbor (2019), and Toronto’s St. Lawrence Market in its revitalized nineteenth-century warehouse district (mid-2000s).

The Stanley Marketplace feels like an old-style enclosed market. It avoids the sterile, marble and glass aesthetic in favor of wood, plants, smaller commercial units, and comfortable seating.  It has plentiful seating and it encourages people to linger, but in such a way that provides natural surveillance and territorial reinforcement to discourage anti-social behavior. It has abundant spaces for larger families to sit and play.

Metro Denver has numerous other adaptive-reuse markets across the city. It is gathering steam. 

Toronto's St. Lawrence market - reuse of a Victorian era industrial building - photo Canmenwalker, CC BY 4.0 via Wiki Commons

WHAT COMES NEXT?

Walking through the Stanley Marketplace felt like entering a place that remembered something essential about city life. People stayed longer, families wandered, and strangers shared tables. The building felt alive in a way many modern commercial districts do not. It brought activity to the street and created comfortable, visible spaces for local entrepreneurs. 

In SafeGrowth we see places like this as emerging community anchors. They grow from the way people use them and they show how neighborhood life strengthens when residents have shared places near their homes. These early projects suggest how future neighborhood hubs might form. They remind us that community centers can return when we design spaces that support connection and belonging.

 

No pooping in my back yard - Canine NIMBYism?

The excluded species from our planning

by Mateja Mihinjac

In our SafeGrowth work, we are constantly defining the most real and human moments of neighbourhood life. Jane Jacobs once advised that we should carefully watch the sidewalk ballet that is the street and watch the natural rhythms that make neighbourhoods work. In today’s world, in the best cities, that world involves our dogs! 

We live in an age obsessed with dogs – they star in adverts, fill social media feeds, and have their own cafés and birthday parties. Yet, in real life, restrictions are often imposed on dogs that communicate they are unwelcome or severely restrict their instinctual behaviour.

On my dog walks, I often observe tiny squares of grass, empty traffic islands, and unused patches of green in urban environments that are full of signs “No Dogs”, “Keep Dogs on Leash”, or the ever-polite “Dog-Free Zone.” The message is: dogs are welcome… but not here. Occasionally, during my walks, I also experience judgmental stares when my dog just sniffs the grass. 

Signs of restriction, not permission

Is this curious paradox a form of modern NIMBYism – canine NIMBYism? This paradox is particularly curious when you notice the signs appear in places where no one else seems to go. The grass stays immaculate and unused. 

While many of those patches of grass invite birds, hedgehogs and cats with intentional food leftovers, the grass is not necessarily reserved for another group. The “no dogs” signs are therefore not necessarily about cleanliness but about defining who it is for. It’s about place politics: ownership and subtle exclusion, even when the space might not be private. 

NEW CANINE RESTRICTIONS

With an increasing density of canine companions, new dog parks now appear as a selling point in neighbourhood (re)developments. Dog parks are ideal for bringing legitimate eyes onto the street — especially in places that might otherwise have no one around to watch. This happens all over the world.

Calgary's East Village development with children's playground, community gardens, dog park, public hiking trails - planning for inclusion and safety

In Calgary, our SafeGrowth planner Anna Brassard worked on the East Village redevelopment years ago, and today that neighbourhood places dog parks beside children’s play areas and community gardens, creating safer, more animated public spaces.

In Slovenia, many cafés and shops now allow smaller dogs inside, letting them accompany their handlers and adding to the natural rhythms of street life.

While dogs are valued in theory, their presence is often controlled or restricted. This has been especially evident over the past years due to increasing numbers of dog ownership. According to one source, 39% of Slovene households have at least one dog, the fifth highest in Europe and above the European average of 25%.

With these numbers, new tensions have also emerged. 

Dog park in Gan Meir, Israel
- photo David Shankbone, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

As more canines populate urban areas and green space is becoming increasingly scarce, Slovenia has recently toughened penalties for dogs off-leash and for neglecting to clean after a dog, aiming to promote “responsible dog ownership”. 

Similar stricter punishments have been introduced in the UK, where restrictions on dogs and their dog handlers are enforced through public spaces protection orders.

Such legislative changes reflect the growing impatience with dogs in public space and the anticipated disruption of public disorder, whether real or not.

RECONCILING PUBLIC ORDER & MESSINESS 

Most people prefer order and feel at unease when it gets disrupted. Yet, dogs sniff, run, bark, chase, pee, poop, which brings a "mess" into otherwise tidy urban space - which is not always so tidy! 

Lovas Kiss describes how dog walkers move through space differently than other users who go about their activities. That sometimes creates feelings of unpredictability and discomfort.

Signs of exclusion, not inclusion

This messiness is also what makes streets and neighbourhoods feel alive. A dog changes the rhythm of a neighbourhood. It draws people out, encourages social contact, creates friendly chaos and animates otherwise dead corners. In a Polish city park study, Bogacka also showed that people with dogs are perceived as more trustworthy and they reduce the perception of unsafety compared to other park visitors.

Some studies suggest that public space should therefore reflect the messiness of life, including noise, smells, joy, and occasionally, inconvenience. Public space need not always feel bare and sterile.

TRANS-SPECIES PLANNING - ANTIDOTE TO CANINE NIMBYism

For this reason, urban studies scholars Phil Hubbard and Andrew Brooks talk about the importance of considering how urban planning practices affect all species. For example, gentrification, often considered undesirable, affects animals as well. They may get displaced, excluded, or their behaviour severely restricted because it’s considered “too messy” in the upscaled environment. 

Calgary's East Village - people, dogs, parks, playground, gardens

Urban geographers Julie Urbanik and Mary Morgan similarly note that planning needs to think about how non-human uses and users fit into urban space and consider aspects like fences, off-leash zones, proximity to residences, conflict management, and other aspects.

Thus, to be inclusive and to reduce the potential for conflicting uses, trans-species urban planning practices need to acknowledge the interactions between human and non-human animals. 

In crime prevention, I often criticise when the focus is exclusively on communicating what is prohibited or penalised or not permitted, rather than informing users about the desirable behaviours. If we want to curb canine NIMBYism, we should stop policing dogs and start planning for them by designing spaces that support the behaviours we want and respecting their nature.