THINKING OUT OF THE BIG BOX: Tracy, CA; Phoenix, AZ; Brooklyn, NY: Current Big box retailers are eager to capture the urban market, faced with statistical data that shows a population shift away from the suburbs and exurbs back to the urban core. However with the steady increase in the value of urban real estate, the suburban, "stand-alone" doctrine of those retailers does not make efficient enough use of land to justify its cost. This new economic calculus--together with the growing neighborhood opposition that big box development has recently been facing in higher density areas--represents an opportunity to introduce a new, more robust model of market-driven development that may represent a new form of urban collective life: one that offers the retailer extended brand recognition through "lifestyle membership", while at the same time offering something back to the surround community. Thinking Out of the Big Box explores how the well-developed brand of one retailer in particular--Target--may be strategically deployed towards the creation of new forms of collective life. Drawn from the social "cosmology" that appears on Targe’s own website, three audiences are posited, each connected with an aspect of the retailer’s own merchandise: Target Green (all things green, in all valences of the term); Target Play (recreation, performance, gaming, etc.); and Target Town (urban life: car washing, commuter stations, post office/convenience store, gyms, workplaces, residential etc.). All three offer what is in undersupply in the geographic context in which they are located: "Town" sits at the ex-urban edge (Tracy, CA); "Green" in an existing suburban power center in arid Phoenix; and "Play" on an urban infill site in open-space starved Brooklyn. Part billboard, part landscape, part catchment area, the project’s inclined, activated surface is simultaneously a strategy of advertisement and concealment, literally and figuratively "branded" with a surface graphic that broadcast Target’s identity and as a formal device in which actual functions may be embedded. :End |
