Article
The always meanwhile future of retail
50°49′15″N 00°08′15″W
Schemes as diverse as New Working Class‘s plans for turning an empty shopping centre in Croydon (London) into a college or the city of Ballarat (Victoria)’s emergent strategy for becoming a ‘creative city’ or LGIM’s ‘beyond the box’ approach to revitalising it’s UK retail assets share a common thread: the practice of treating the highstreet and town centre as being in an ‘always meanwhile’ state.
‘Meanwhile state’ is the name given to the temporary – usually locally run, often highly creative – use of land earmarked for future development. Its temporary status allowing for a highly flexible mix of community-driven uses, meanwhile states are both the clever utilisation of land and property that would otherwise lie unused and the means by which developers and commissioning bodies build relationships with local community groups. The very best of them have the capacity to inform the masterplanning. ‘Always meanwhile’, therefore, describes a practice (intentional or otherwise) understood not as a temporary (dispensable) measure, but rather as the foundation for the making and remaking of the highstreet.
In this respect, we borrow from Frank Duffy’s theory that a building’s components –fixed, non-fixed , and programmatic – are best understood as layers of temporality. Whether speaking of the highstreet’s fixed physical base (buildings, road, and landscaping), its non-fixed structure (interior architecture and shop design and graphic treatment, or its programming (technologies, hosting, services, feedback loops), everything is in various states of flux, always in a state of change. The oxymoronic moniker ‘always meanwhile’ is designed to bring attention to the inherently dynamic nature of all systems, including the highstreet. In the name of creating highstreets capable of evolving, it asks that:
– Governance and policies are designed to accommodate change, creativity, and new ways of defining retail. Not an easy ask, but exactly what happened during the pandemic, with a change in the categorising of use classes, allowing developers, designers, landlords, and tenants to move from class to class, and to mix those classes in a single property. The concern around conversion to residential apart, it provides ‘a new legal framework for the making of the experiential highstreet’.
– The design of the highstreet and retail space in general is led by the notion of experience, in which developers (re)create rich programmable platforms and then support tenants, partners, and associations in the activation of that platform. Examples of this, large and small, new and old: YOO Capital’s development of London’s Olympia, Poplar HARCAS’s plans for Aberfeldy Village, Chippendale’s Kensington Street (Sydney), and the UK’s Stockton-on-Tees.
– We design for change, pushing against a tradition of shackling retail architecture to efficiency-above-all pushes, siloed leaseholds, and a ‘commissioning regime that is more an old boys club than a meritocracy’. We reuse whatever we can and build intentional redundancy and therefore adaptability into new architecture. For examples of how in the real adaptive reuse world, see Bikini Berlin or Shanghai’s Tianzifang. For something still in the realms of the imagination, see Cedric Price’s unrealised Fun Palace.
– The above is understood as the necessary three-part precurser to creating highstreets that embody the spirit of the ‘always meanwhile’, places that are the ‘domain of the impresario, the maker, the storyteller, the work of the theatre designer, the art director, the event manager, the live producer, where the art installation hoarding informs the market stall informs the pop-up restaurant informs the maker festival informs the seasonal enterprise scheme informs the modular neighbourhood centre.’ Melbourne’s laneways, for example, or Beijings hutongs.
The always meanwhile highstreet is neither fixed nor finished. On the contrary, alert to the needs and wants of the emminently social, curious, and creative beings we refer to as ‘consumers’, ‘customers’, and ‘footfall’, it is the most accessible of public realms, a place that is ‘composed less of what is generally labelled mixed use, and more of a rich campus-like mix of activities, a blur of traditional retail, hospitality, workplace, entertainment and, less obviously, healthcare, education and experience-based pop-ups.’ A beta-place, the highstreet as perpetual field test. It’s where, in other words, we get to carry on being human.
Unless otherwise stated, all quotes in this article come from Retail and Hospitality in RETHINK Design Guide: Architecture for a post-pandemic world (RIBA), co-authored by FreeState’s Adam Scott and Dave Waddell. Full disclosure: FreeState was commissioned by the city of Ballarat to work on the vision for Ballarat Bridge Mall and by New Working Class on its concept design for the ongoing Croydon bid. Any queries, thoughts, or projects, please get in touch with place strategist, change facilitator, and FreeState MD Su Lim.
Image credit: Hero image, Cedric Price.