As final plans for the shopping center begin to emerge, showing the size and layout of the stores, parking area, and service areas, the planner becomes vitally concerned. Shopping center developers, as shown in the earlier reports, must consider many facts which are not strictly within city planning jurisdiction, such as the trade potential of the area surrounding the shopping center, and the types of stores that should be located in a particular shopping center. The planner is most concerned with four stages of the shopper's trip - the road he travels to get to the center,the point at which he leaves this road and enters the center, the search for an unoccupied parking space, and the walk to the stores. After that, we leave him to the world of stretchable hose and non-stretchable budgets. The planner is concerned primarily with the shopper and his (her) trip to the shopping center only after the shopper is driving on the road and up to the time that he enters one of the stores in the center. The present report shows how the analysis previously described relates to the gross acreage, parking and site design requirements of a shopping center.įinally the report describes some of the zoning provisions already enacted for shopping centers and comments on some of the problems for city planners raised by shopping centers. 44 and 47 have covered market area analysis for shopping centers and criteria and standards for shopping center stores.
PLANNING ADVISORY SERVICE Information Reports Nos. They differ also in the trade area served, and the types of shopping needs fulfilled. The two types of shopping centers will differ considerably in their area requirements, the number and types of stores, and the annual gross business. Shopping centers may be distinguished between those that are dominated by a supermarket or retail grocery, and whose secondary store is a drug store or variety store and those that are dominated by a department store, and whose secondary store is a supermarket, or another department store.
Every shopping center that we know of has a supermarket (a large retail grocery) in it, and the supermarket is either the largest traffic generator of the shopping center, or is secondary only to a department store in the center. Shopping center business is drawn almost entirely from people who live within a maximum of thirty minutes driving time over local roads, and most customers live closer.Ī shopping center is a group of retail stores planned and designed for the site on which they are built, located away from the central business district, to serve the shopping needs of new suburban and fringe growth. She must run the household and do the shopping, and cannot afford the longer trip to the center of the city - a trip which may have to be taken on slow and crowded public transportation, or by car over congested and hazardous roads with no guarantee that there will be a place to park the car once the central business district has been reached.
Whatever the social consequences of this situation, it results also in greater dependence on the woman to maintain the day-to-day life of the family. The farther out from the center of the city that a family lives, the less time the man of the family spends at home. Shopping centers in suburban areas are nearer the population they serve (in driving time), offer a relatively large (if sometimes inadequate) amount of conveniently located off-street parking, and fit in with the patterns of suburban living described by Burgess and other urban sociologists as long as twenty-five years ago. Central business districts which were relatively adequate to handle the number (taking their income into account) of people in metropolitan areas a decade and a half ago, are now cramped, crowded and clogged with street traffic. Metropolitan areas have grown rapidly in recent years, but the growth has taken place for the most part outside of the central city. Suburban shopping centers have come into existence, grown in size, and increased in number not because they offer new products or better stores than are to be found in central business districts, but because they are convenient. Site Design, Parking and Zoning for Shopping Centers Membership for Allied Professionals & Citizensġ313 EAST 60TH STREET - CHICAGO 37 ILLINOIS