Urban revitalization: when retail giants lead the way

Please excuse me for the lack of posts in the last few weeks. I’ve been busy preparing my move to Vancouver and slowly adjusting to my new life here. I hope to be able to write about all the good stuff happening in the city and hopefully visit other west coast cities such as Portland and Seattle.

This week, I’ve been looking at how chain stores can participate in urban revitalization. While doing some research for an article, I stumbled upon this 2005 Seattle Times article. American Apparel had just opened its first Seattle store in an area that was trying to take on a new lease of life, and hoped their presence would attract other boutiques. The article described their strategy:

While scouting locations for American Apparel stores, Webb looks for signs that speak to a hippay sensibility. Literal signs, such as “Loft Available” or “Vegetarian Restaurant.”

In a few instances, American Apparel is an active player in bringing other retailers to a street, leasing more space than it needs and subletting to those that cater to the same demographic.

In Houston, a city of malls, American Apparel opted to open downtown, where fashion boutiques do not exist, and is negotiating for a location in downtown San Jose, Calif. Yes, San Jose has a downtown.

And in Portland, American Apparel opened a store 18 months ago among boarded-up buildings on Southwest Stark Street instead of in the nearby Pearl District, where trendy redevelopment already had taken hold.

(By the way, did anybody stick with the term “hippay”?)

I never thought of urban revitalization as a conscious process, especially not operated by retail giants. Most of the time, revitalization happens progressively when store owners and artists look for cheap retail spaces and studios. But I incidentally found a similar example of this.

Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitter’s new headquarters are housed in a huge five-building, 11-acre campus located in the Philadelphia Navy Yard. The building houses offices for the company’s different brands (Urban Outfitters, Free People, Anthropologie and Terrain) as well as employee services: a cafeteria, a coffee bar, a library and a fitness centre. The clothing and houseware company undertook the redevelopment of this former shipbuilding complex in 2004. The revamped buidings are a wonderful example of adaptation of turn-of-the-century industrial archictecture to contemporary purposes.

This great article from Metropolis magazine sums up pretty well the change this represented for the company:

The idea of yanking more than 600 of Philadelphia’s most creative—not to mention best-dressed —workers out of downtown was the equivalent of exiling Manhattan’s Seventh Avenue fashion houses to an industrial park near JFK. Losing so many trendsetters would surely diminish the Center City District’s hard-won cool quotient. Meanwhile all those hipsters in skinny jeans and vintage boots would have to figure out how to get to a compound so far off the city grid it was practically tumbling into the Delaware River. There wasn’t a coffeehouse or magazine stand in sight.

Other businesses have since relocated to the Navy Yard, creating more than 4,000 jobs and participating in the rebirth of South Philadelphia.

See more pictures on Decor8’s Flickr photostream.