Mall Fall: A Sharing Ecosystem for Collective Living

Abstract

The suburban shopping mall, once a prototypical feature of the American suburban landscape, has been in decline for several decades. Like a whale carcass which is dissected and shared by numerous organisms, the dead mall offers a concentrated opportunity for a new ecosystem through the occupation and transformation of the large structure. Using the Greece Ridge Mall in Rochester, New York, this thesis imagines this ecosystem by redefining suburban everyday practices of sharing into forms of collective living: from potlucks and hosting students to community classes and home businesses. Applying adaptive reuse strategies to retrofit the anchor stores, concourses, and mall architecture, the project questions both the spatial form of increasingly important sharing behaviors and the picture of housing in suburbia. Behaviors, from sharing a fridge to sharing a spare room, gradually create a complex ecosystem to enrich the new residents and surrounding community until the mall is completely shared.