Scenes From a New Mall

Like so many suburbs, Lakewood, Colo., near Denver, never had a downtown. Now it does. Well, actually, what it has is Belmar, a shopping center--only this isn't your basic strip mall. It's what's called a "lifestyle center," an idealized vision of an urban streetscape, with 22 open-air blocks of cafés, performance spaces, offices, housing, parks and, of course, chain stores familiar to anyone who's spent time in the Galleria (can you say Sharper Image and Victoria's Secret?). "Belmar is the downtown that Lakewood never had," says Tom Gougeon of Continuum Partners, the project's developer.

The malling of America has taken a decidedly Disney-esque twist. Designed like elaborate outdoor movie sets, lifestyle centers are meant to look like real towns, with curbed streets, parking meters and themed architecture (think Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A.). They're cropping up on the fringes of cities from Washington, D.C., to San Diego: 150 so far, with 100 more in the pipeline. Phoenix has about a dozen in the works. Big shopping mall developers like Westfield Group of Australia and General Growth Properties of Chicago are behind some of the projects; others are being built by local firms like Continuum in Denver. "It's a buzzword right now, the trendy thing to call your shopping development," says Malachy Kavanagh, a spokesman for the International Council of Shopping Centers. The trend is being driven by (you guessed it) baby boomers, who left the cities long ago but still remember singing Petula Clark's "Downtown."

The ersatz urbanity does leave some aghast. "Lifestyle centers are corporate attempts to mitigate the fact that we've turned our nation into a parking lot filled with places that are not worth living in or caring about," says author Jim Kunstler, who decries suburbia in his book, "The Geography of Nowhere." Continuum's Gougeon counters that "lifestyle centers are just a matter of developers giving consumers what they want": A cosmopolitan experience for those who "don't necessarily want to leave their towns, their social networks, their churches and golf courses."

Many mom-and-pop retailers, already wounded from the onslaught of big-box chains like Wal-Mart, worry these malls may finish the job. "We sort of resent the fact that these lifestyle centers are calling themselves 'downtowns' when we already have a downtown," says Jeanette Billings, a director of the Downtown Naples Association in Florida, formed recently by local merchants concerned about the opening of four lifestyle centers north of the city.

Yet shoppers seem to love them. Some 80,000 came to gawk at the outdoor fireplace, kids' popper fountain, chalk garden and doggie park at the mission-style Otay Ranch Town Center, which opened a few weeks ago in Chula Vista, Calif., near San Diego. The mall, built by General Growth Properties, likes to think of itself as a downtown, though the operators clearly don't want it to be too urban: The "code of conduct" prohibits spitting, swearing, skateboarding and congregating in large groups (unlike downtowns, lifestyle centers are mostly privately owned). Such manufactured civility is part of what convinced Chris Salderman, 32, to purchase a loft condominium at Belmar with his wife. "It gives you the feeling that you're in a city, but without all the chaos," he says. "You can walk around at night and there are things to do, but you don't worry about the drunks on the streets." Urban pioneers of suburbia might want to come up with lyrics of their own: "things will be great when you're not downtown."