The Decorated Corpse

I'd like to take a look at City Creek Center, a major project in Salt Lake City, Utah. It represents the height of contemporary thinking in urban planning. I'd like to talk about why it does not represent legitimate, healthy urban development, but instead kills the living city, if anything remains, and then decorates the corpse so that the place may look healthy on the surface. I took the title of this post, it's worth noting, from Robert Venturi's landmark study of the vernacular architecture of Las Vegas, in which he describes the difference between 'Ducks' and 'Decorated Sheds' in the world of Architecture. In the world of urban planning, a similar dichotomy exists between decisions about the living city and creative ways to decorate the urban cadaver. After discussing this concept, I'll apply it to the particular project of City Creek Center and argue why that isn't a legitimate replacement for healthy urban development, and is likely detrimental. 

The south side entrance to City Creek Center at Richards Street. The 99 West Apartments (formerly The Promontory) are seen in the distance. ( Mangoman88)

Venturi's take on the difference between 'Ducks' and 'Decorated Sheds' is that Ducks (taken from a duck-shaped roadside stand on Long Island selling eggs) are buildings that are  designed to be specifically and only what they are. Conversion to another use would be impossible or at least quite difficult. The Decorated Shed is a building that is designed in such a way that would allow it to accommodate a wide variety of uses. It may be a clothing store today, but it may very well be a coffee shop tomorrow. One need only change the sign and the interior design. Venturi makes no judgements about this, only an observation and a note to other architects to have more respect for the decorated shed than is normally shown, considering their ubiquity and usefulness in our society and economy.

I completely agree with Venturi that we should all have more respect for the decorated shed. These are the buildings that we all live our lives in. Whether we live in them as apartment buildings and condos, or work in them as office towers and retail stores; these buildings are largely what make the city. They allow the city to function economically and socially. But I am taking only the term (the Decorated _____), not the larger concept. And I am most certainly making a value judgement. What is happening in American cities right now with mega-projects like City Creek Center (this project is certainly not alone) is that space that should be reserved for a healthy urban marketplace is instead being turned over to development companies who then decide to bulldoze the living city and replace it with a per-fabricated version of a city where low value uses don't exist and (consequently) neither do low value people. If you thought urban gentrification had negative aspects, wait till they can just skip the middle man and replace the old development with a finished product that they've deemed appropriate. And it's killing the cities we live in. If you can't tell that the city is dying, that's the point. It's a decorated corpse.

So why do I say that the city is dying? Well, to answer that question, we'll have to look farther back than the construction of City Creek Center, because the center of Salt Lake was killed a long time ago. 

In 1975 the ZCMI Center Mall was constructed in the center of Salt Lake City. It, along with Crossroads Plaza directly across Main Street, replaced over a hundred years of urban development right in the center of the city. This was tantamount to ripping out the heart of the living city. The intersection adjacent to These two developments is the dead center of the city and they occupy the two blocks that are the historic, cultural, and economic heart of the city. As was true to form in the modern age, the disorganization that is the hallmark of a healthy city was thought to be a negative, so the buildings and businesses that occupied those blocks were removed and replaced with a nice, clean, suburban mall. Unfortunately, the mall did not provide any of the things the city needed and, eventually, the city returned the favor. Like most malls, ZCMI Center ran its course and had to be replaced in order to continue producing revenue. That's when City Creek Center showed up. To be fair, the city was long dead before City Creek got there.

Certainly more remains to be said on what it means to be a living city. How can I say that one type of urban development is alive and another is dead? What I mean by the living city is that, quite simply, the city is functioning in the manner that it has evolved to do. Whatever specifics there are, the urban environment has evolved over the centuries to accommodate the people who live there, and if the urban environment doesn't accommodate the residents, I think it can reliably be said to be a dead city.

So how are these types of developments not meeting the needs of residents? That can be approached in two different ways: we can look at who is being accommodated by the development and; we can look at who lives there. Firstly, City Creek Center, which is one of the better of these types of developments,  has the triumvirate of needs being met: commercial, residential, and employment. The commercial element of these developments is most telling: Like any mall, the stores are overwhelmingly dominated by high end fashions. The products on offer are overwhelmingly in the highest thinkable price range. That, however, is not the biggest problem. The housing in City Creek is extremely expensive, so the residents of this development can probably afford the clothing in the stores at this mall, and much more. And the much more is one of the main problems. While the residents of City Creek Center have substantial incomes, the 'community' that they live in only offers one or two things, by design. Normal activities that everyone needs are not present. There are plenty of clothing stores, but no dry cleaners. No tailor. Several high end shoe stores, but no Shoe Repair. High end dining, but no diners. There's a single gigantic supermarket, but there are no independent butchers, delis, fruit stands, fishmongers, or grocers to provide competition. The more ordinary, everyday needs of the residents of the buildings in this development can't be met inside it.

What about the other half? Can the residents of the City Creek development meet its needs? There are several office towers that are unrelated to the retail portion of the development which have existed in this area for years. Salt Lake being a banking center for the West, those office towers are owned and dominated by retail banks. Those banks have plenty of high paying jobs that may very well be occupied by residents of the high-end, expensive condo towers at City Creek center. But even those glass bank towers undoubtedly also have plenty of jobs that pay average or even below average salaries. Those people have to live elsewhere and commute into the development every day. Along with them, most of the employees of the main commercial portion of the development, the mall stores. No matter how high end the store may be, the employees are still mostly on the lower end of the wage spectrum. There's still a food court with fast food workers, the people who unload freight, janitors, and everyone else that makes a mall development like this work. Those people can't afford to live in the expensive housing that is part of the development. And there are far more of them than the development would be able to house, even if the housing were a reasonable price.

So how could a development like City Creek be altered to better provide the whole city experience that is promises to? How can planners of these sorts of projects better balance housing, jobs, and retail to ensure that the right numbers of high-end wage earners, along with everyone else, can enjoy the new addition to the city? Well, they can't, of course. Two square blocks of a city are never going to be a city unto themselves. The thing City Creek does wrong is that it largely isolates itself from the surrounding city. Nothing about the project works together with the surrounding city. This is, after all is said and done, a mall. And it's located in the dead center of downtown, amid office towers. The restaurants inside are geared towards weekend shoppers. Those outside are serving office workers on their lunch break. Every city is a mix of these wonderful contradictions. But here, there's not much mix. And more importantly, not much change.

In the end, change is what marks whether the city is alive or dead. In developments like City Creek, nothing changes. Or, more accurately, nothing changes without the decision being made by the management of the mall. Yes, one store might be replaced by another, but the replacement won't be determined by market needs. Outside the mall, restaurants and shops will come and go over the course of years. Some will succeed and remain, while others will fail to anticipate the will of the public. And they'll fall by the wayside. But they'll be replaced by another. And another, until a better fit arrives. And through it all, the very landscape that these businesses are building on will shift, with trends and fashions shifting public demand even as these businesses move to accommodate what the public was wanting last week. Bracing and pushing against their neighbors while trying to stay erect on these shifting sands, the individual businesses and organizations that comprise the city outside will remain or fail but the city will succeed and grow, based on this model. This state of flux is natural and healthy for the city. Which is why the arrival of a suburban shopping mall to replace downtown herald's its death. The mall can't emulate the functioning of a real city.

Salt Lake City has been working hard to repair the damage done by that mall built in place of its downtown in the 1970s. I think the 're-malling' of downtown has been irrelevant at best, but we can hope that the city will continue to develop despite the corpse laying at the center. I don't see how the best decoration for it can make a difference, though.