Now we know the Mall owners are scared, really scared, of new competition (revised 15 November 2007)

November 11, 2007 in Development, Globalization, law, Shopping Malls, sustainability, Urban Planning, urbanism

Here’s an interesting and important legal decision that will have some very real urban design/architectural implications. It’s yet another example of small, local and very particularized developments eclipsing centralized, consolidated, and homogenized ones.

It’s also interesting from another point of view: what information we get from this lawsuit. Lawsuits are actually very efficient ways of distributing information, as each lawsuit reveals things through the adversarial process that wouldn’t always come out. In this case the information is clear: Caruso’s development model is such a threat that his competition thought the legal risk they placed themselves in was worth it. That gives an insight as to how dangerous they thought this competition is, and what means they have to counter it. They think this competition is dangerous, and they don’t have a clear way of adapting to this threat.

And we see the theme of competition between things of different scales that was discussed here. The quote from Schumpeter that I just love also talks about changing scales. (I hadn’t noticed that before! How could I miss that?)