A vacant shoe store became the war room last weekend for developers, architects and citizens who met to brainstorm how to turn the doomed South Square Mall and its surroundings into a vibrant community center.
"We're aiming to create a true urban place," said Steve Gaddis, a Durham architect and member of Durham Area Designers, the volunteer group that helped organize the workshop along with the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Center for Urban and Regional Studies.
With the opening of the Streets at Southpoint in 2002, many of South Square's tenants will leave for the massive new mall. Still, the mood was cheerful Saturday when attendants broke into clusters Saturday morning, drawing ideas with markers on brown paper.
One group split the 52-acre South Square site into gridded streets with a mass transit hub close by. They visualized U.S. 15-501 Business as a tree-lined boulevard, labeling it "Champs-Elysees."
Another group depicted a common green space where now exists a Kroger parking lot.
Is Kroger going out of business?
"Oh, no, no, no," said Holly Forrester-Miller, a resident of Duke Forest apartments. "We're just designing what we want."
Despite all of the brainstorming, the fate of the South Square site ultimately depends on the mall's owners. But asked if any of the workshop's ideas would come to fruition, city council member Dan Hill was optimistic. "God, I hope so. You know how people at Duke talk badly about Durham, and Durhamites talk badly about Durham too," he said. "But it's a matter of attitude. If people start feeling good about Durham, we can outshine Raleigh and Chapel Hill."
The designs produced by the workshop reflect many of the tenets of New Urbanism-the movement nationwide to plan walkable, bikeable communities where residences are close to shops and restaurants, and parks are centered in the landscape.
"We used to be able to design cities, and then we lost that," Gaddis said between bites of pizza. "Now we're learning again."
Lynn Rohweder, who lives on nearby Old Sugar Road, brought her son Nate to the workshop. "When we saw the flyer we got very excited, because the media had portrayed, accurately or inaccurately, the owner of the mall as paralyzed," Rohweder said. "We were concerned that things would go downhill."
The issues arising with South Square's inevitable demise are being faced by communities across the nation, noted Chuck Bohl, a doctoral student at UNC's Center for Urban and Regional Studies. Bohl pointed to a study by the Congress for the New Urbanism, which reports that hundreds of older malls are perishing in suburbs.
"Malls are failing all over the country. People are tired of the format-it's closed, it's inauthentic," Bohl said. "What we're seeing is a market-driven closure."
The Saturday workshop followed Friday night's address by mall redevelopment expert Victor Dover on "Reinventing the Mall" and a session where citizens called out ideas for future facilities. Suggestions included a playground, a performing arts center, a teen center or skate park and housing for people of all ages.
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