Should one size fit all? Retail centres in culturally diverse new suburbs

Retail centres often form the heart of suburban neighbourhoods and are particularly important in new growth area suburbs where there is little provided other than housing. Shopping centres offer access to essential goods and services and provide some amount of local employment. They are communal meeting places and places of social interaction, providing a focal point to neighbourhoods and projecting a sense of identity and character. This is particularly true in suburbs where other community infrastructure (i.e. schools, libraries, and community centres) are lacking. For these reasons, the location, design and functioning of suburban retail centres is critically important.

Our research, however, suggests that too little consideration is given to the planning, design and delivery of these centres. They are generally built on a standard model of an inward facing mall surrounded by car parking, and limited entry and exit points. They have one or more major supermarkets or discount stores as anchor tenant and a range of smaller shops, often franchises of familiar branded chains of bakeries, electrical goods, homewares etc. These centres will be used by local residents if there are no alternatives, so they will be financially viable for their owners and investors once there are enough local residents in their catchment area. However, there are often long delays in their arrival waiting for sufficient local residents to move in. When they are finally built, they contribute little to the character of the local area, and provide few services beyond retail or other community facilities. New outer suburbs are home to a wide variety of cultural communities and often to newly arrived immigrants, yet their cultural identities and preferences are not reflected in the bland shopping malls provided.

In this article we focus on the diversity and equity considerations of Australia’s suburban shopping areas – mindful that growth area suburbs are generally the most affordable areas of our large cities and that providing poorer quality urban amenity will exacerbate spatial inequalities. The pattern of higher property values around the inner and many middle ring suburbs in a city such as Melbourne, is in part due to the established heritage and character of those areas. But it also demonstrates that people value living in closer proximity to a broader range of jobs, shops, services and civic infrastructure, and are prepared to pay more to do so. When we build new suburbs with very little other than houses and basic shopping malls, we are building in inequity by ensuring that these places will not be chosen by people who can afford better.

Shopping mall form

The contemporary model of the shopping centre was pioneered by Victor Gruen in an attempt to re-create a European town centre for the motor car age, designed for pedestrians with cars parked around the periphery. It is quite distinct from older-style suburban retail areas which grew up along a main street or around a train station. The inner and middle ring suburbs of most Australian cities still have retail centres where shops are individually owned or managed and are not centrally controlled or planned. By contrast, centres built over the later half of the 20th century and beyond are almost exclusively corporately owned and operated shopping malls, with one or two main anchor stores (usually one of the big two supermarkets) and a predictable range of chain stores, very few other services or offices, with a standard box-like form surrounded by a sea of car parking.

While the larger regional malls now include a variety of recreational and entertainment-focused activities, the smaller malls more commonly opened in new suburbs remain fairly basic and minimal. Some malls have also begun to mimic aspects of the traditional town centre by developing food and beverage offerings and sometimes al fresco areas at the perimeter. Despite these occasional adaptations, the diversity of the retail stores is low and the ranges of other services or uses minimal. The homogenous character of shopping malls is inherent to their sense of familiarity. But suburbs are not homogenous – and the shops often fail to reflect anything about the character of the local community.

Ownership and economic opportunities

Historically, in older suburban areas of Melbourne, new immigrant communities quickly became visible through the opening of restaurants and cafes, or other small businesses focussed on the needs and interests of their community. These businesses provided important economic opportunities for new arrivals, as well as establishing their place in the community. High street-based shopping environments offer local communities relatively greater opportunities in opening a new business as generally there are lower rents and less stringent leasing conditions applicable. In contrast, corporate shopping mall tenancies are more tightly controlled, with a strong preference for a specific mix of retail functions and familiar branded retailers in order to minimise risk as perceived by and for investors.

A predominance of generic chain stores does not necessarily mean that particular immigrant communities are not catered for by them or the mainstream supermarkets, or able to get employment there. However, many commentators have been critical of the impacts of corporate mall dominance on the diversity of small business opportunities. Small independent businesses may struggle to set up in a corporate mall environment because of the retail governance and business models that determine store type, operating days and hours, and the high rental cost per square metre. Shopping mall owners and managers are also likely to have a preference for generic chain stores over those focussed on particular cultural communities, as they are more familiar and predictable. It is all about minimising risk for shopping centre investors.

A closer look at suburban centres in Melbourne’s north

Melbourne’s new outer suburbs are culturally diverse locations, partly because they are relatively more affordable destinations than inner-urban areas for new migrant communities, and partly through preference [1]. We might hope then that shopping centres would reflect this diversity in terms of the mix of people who visit them, and the range and type of retail outlets to be found there.

We conducted a study in one of the highest immigration areas in Melbourne (Hume-Craigieburn) where we visited seven shopping centres – four in the form of the standard corporate shopping malls and three that were more traditional mixed shopping centres with greater degrees of individual ownership in the older parts of the study area. We were looking to see the extent to which the cultural identities of the local communities were obvious in the range of shops provided, and whether the shopping mall was able to provide both goods and employment opportunities for those communities to the same extent as the more traditional centres. At each we recorded the total number of shops along with the number of non-chain stores and those with an explicit ethnic offering as suggested by the name or signage as an indicator of diversity of local economic opportunities within the centres.

The centres ranged in age from ten to sixty years. We found that the number of clearly locally owned, non-chain shops in the corporately owned shopping malls were small, with three of them having less than 6% of such shops, and only one with more at 12% (3 shops out of 25). In the three older traditional centres there was a much greater proportion of clearly locally owned, non-chain shops comprised, ranging from 27% (3 of 11) to 48% (13 of 27) and 70% (16 of 23). These three centres were far more reflective of local migrant groups – Polynesian, Samoan, Arabic, Middle Eastern and South Asian - both in apparent business ownership and offerings, and in visual signage. Some were dominated by shops explicitly owned by or targeted toward specific groups in the area [3]. The four corporately owned malls each had at least one niche retailer owned by, or explicitly targeted to, migrant groups. However, these shops were very small in number and represented a tiny minority of the total number of shops, which in general offered little sense of local variation.

Planning for greater diversity

The consistency and sameness of the corporate model of shopping centres is both the reason for its success in attracting investors, (as it is seen as tried and tested and therefore safe), and for its failure in being able to provide a clear expression of local community identity. While aspects of design of the suburban mall may have altered a little over time, the standardised recognisable form continues to look very similar in reality. This appears to be driven by a combination of corporate practice, and lack of attention by the planning processes. It is planned and delivered as a single entity with planners allocating land with the broad parameters of a ‘town centre’, and shopping centre developers designing the centre formats. It is generally one of the last aspects of a new suburb to be rolled out. Shopping centres will only be built once a viable number of customers exists in the catchment area and when anchor tenants are prepared to open there. As the development of new suburbs is often staged by developers to coordinate their cash flow and expenses, the implementation of retail centres can occur late in the life of a suburb.

This delay - sometimes for as long as a decade - has a major impact on new residents. We have encountered several examples of long delays in shopping malls in new suburban areas (example at Allura, [2] covered in the media recently). Residents we have interviewed have expressed disappointment and frustration “I was expecting the shopping centre to be finished because (…) when I bought the land, six and a half, seven years ago, they said Woolworths has already bought the land there and they're going to construct it all here. (…) It's almost six years, and it's never been done”.

A key challenge for new suburban areas is that it is difficult to replicate the traditional street-based centre (with its multiple owners) using the largescale Precinct Structure Planning (PSP) procedures that underpin growth area planning in Melbourne, because of the scale of planning and development. Retail lots are now very rarely sold or leased in individual buildings or small plots. New suburban PSPs typically set aside large areas as ‘future town centres’ awaiting development and ongoing management by suburban shopping centre managers who will work to their own timetables.

Greater diversity of retail offering and increased business opportunities could be provided if the centres were divided for sale into individual lots or premises, as occurs in traditional strip centres. There is, however, currently no specific policy support for nor incentive for a town centre developer to do this, and an obvious disincentive in terms of time, effort, and uncertainty. Very few retail malls are offered to individual ownership, and where they have been through strata titling, they still remain corporately managed and run.

If diversity in ownership and economic opportunity is key, as we argue it is, a new way of planning for retail is required. It might be that a further step in the planning process is required involving a public agency acquiring and reselling the land for a town centre in smaller parcels or individual lots, with much greater attention focussed on the actual design and location of shops and business premises. This could also address issues of transport and access which this article has not had the space to address. Mall-based centres are intrinsically planned around private cars and significant amounts of car parking. Planning policy suggests that centres should be located near public transport, (for example a train station where one exists), yet centre developers prefer locations on main roads where they can attract passing car traffic. While planning controls in Australia shape some aspects of the location of suburban retail centres, and set minimum amounts of car parking provision, an alternative focus of planners could be on facilitating accessible and shorter-term business spaces, and to support the provision and placement of, for example, public transport stops, and pedestrian access.

The experience of COVID-19 has in many ways placed more emphasis on living locally and the importance of the local environment. With the rise of working from home, and changes in movement and spending patterns both during and after COVID restrictions, some suburban shopping areas have seen a resurgence in certain kinds of shopping such as local cafes and food businesses. Others have been impacted by shifts in for example, discretionary spending and online retailing. Our research suggests that the degree to which they adapted – and the degree to which smaller and newer businesses rather than the major anchor tenants have benefited – will have been shaped in part by the design and operation of different centre types.

While new suburban shopping centres are delivered by suburban shopping centre managers, planning processes also play a role and can influence the diversity and accessibility of retail areas in our suburbs. We see this in the different tenancies and offerings of older, individually owned strip centres versus corporate malls. Each type has a role in Australian suburbs, however we argue that new suburbs are too dependent on the timetables of shopping centre corporations. Rather than simply allocating large areas as ‘future town centres’ awaiting development and ongoing corporate management, planners may consider providing for smaller individually titled retail lots or directly providing infrastructure for independent tenancies. Planning settings do influence the diversity and accessibility of retail areas.

Planners need to better consider the broader implications for equity in and across suburban areas given the important role that shopping centres play in our suburbs. Continuing to allow only basic, characterless places with little opportunity for innovation is condemning these areas to always be lacking key features of amenity which residents want. Communities change over time, and while this change and adaptation is possible in areas with multiple owned building it is severely limited within the shopping mall. New ways of planning, designing and delivering centres must be explored to break away from the cookie cutter model which is limiting change adaptability and local community expression.

The research was first published as a book chapter, Goodman, R & Taylor, E 2022, ‘Suburban Shopping Malls in Melbourne, Australia: Changing Roles and Impacts as New Town Centres for Diverse Communities’, in PJ Maginn & KB Anacker (eds), Suburbia in the 21st Century: From Dreamscape to Nightmare? Routledge, Oxon, UK, pp. 56-77