The ART of Social Condensing

Lifestyle centers such as the Easton Town Center are interesting artifacts, in regards to their programmatic layout and location. Programmatically, centers such as these lend themselves to the lifestyle found in areas of high population density and more urban environments. Combining housing and grocery with big name retail and restaurant dinning provides a very stable shopping demographic and the perfect solution to creating the opportunity for customers to revisit the location. What I find interesting is that locations such as these have been successful in the suburban context. The density of the surrounding area has not forced this type of lifestyle on the occupants, such as living complexes in Manhattan or Hong Kong have, but they have served as a social condenser at both the internal residential scale and the outward communal town scale. They have also been beneficial for the town due to the fact that they drastically increase the value of surround property and keep the taxes for the aid of their own community. Lakewood Town Center is a perfect example of the positive effects that can come from development projects such as these and should be used as models for smaller cites of a similar problem.
It is also interesting to consider the point at which retail development can become detrimental to a society. Projects like Lakewood and Easton have proven to work at a fairly large scale, but mega malls such as Destiny seem to take away from the sense of community. Although the tax income of the community may increase with sales, there is appoint where retail of such large scale can hurt the small business.