When urban renewal goes wrong: Inside a dead mall frozen in 1990.
Very interesting short film by Bright Sun Films. Along with the usual urban exploration bits, he gives a good history of how and why it failed.
The shopping centre was supposed to revitalise downtown Hamilton, Ontario.
But within six years, it had just a 40% occupancy rate.
A decade after opening, it sold for only CAN$3.6 million — just 5% of what it originally cost to build.
https://youtu.be/NV_c_c_RZdE?si=4fNO5BJAoWzcx_bw
#urbanism #UrbanPlanning #Canada #Ontario @urbanism #UrbanRenewal #malls #DeadMalls #UrbEx #UrbanExplaration
@OldWoodFrame @ajsadauskas
Learning about Buffalo’s downtown revitalisation efforts in the 70s helped me piece together something i hadn’t quiet figured out about US cities. I never realised that many city’s had dumped millions into ‘fixing’ their downtowns to include multitudes of parking and remove the relics of a more glorious age. I had always kind of assumed those buildings just burned down and were adhoc replaced with parking, rather than that it was an extremely expensive and concerted effort to attract people downtown by replicating the experience of suburban shopping malls.
@jedsetter @OldWoodFrame @ajsadauskas Yup. A lot of the US cities with the healthiest downtowns now were really struggling financially in the 70s and simply couldn’t afford to follow the trendy bad advice of the day.