Why strip malls?

Strip Mall Ethnography was originally an idea I brought up in the Public Design Workshop during the brainstorming sessions around Imaging Atlanta Transportation in the Fall of 2007. When we were throwing around topics in the early stages of our work I thought it would be interesting to take panoramas of various strip malls around Atlanta.

Growing up in the DC suburbs, I was well acquainted with strip malls as a very necessary part of suburban life. But it wasn't until I spent time living in Austin, TX and Atlanta, GA that I came to know a culturally robust, ubiquitous, and, yes, urban strip mall.

Within weeks of moving to Atlanta, I'd gone out in Northeast Plaza and Midtown Promenade, two strip malls I returned to for this project, and I was amazed at the variety of activities and shops each place had to offer. In fact, my first visit to Midtown Promenade was my also first taste of nightlife within a strip mall.

When the time came to formulate a master's project proposal I thought it would be a great opportunity to revisit the simple idea I popped on a post-it note and crudely sketched more than a year prior. I started a process blog and commenced snapping photos of strip malls. This section of Strip Mall Ethnography seeks to account for the work and processes that went into creating the project itself. From my brain to your screen.

Research

Early on I was heavily influenced by the work of Kevin Lynch. Most notably, his 1960 book The Image of the City, which provided a fundamental scaffold for what I was looking for in these spaces.

Using his elements of the city – paths, edges, nodes, districts, landmarks – I began to categorize elements of my case studies. After my preliminary outings, I recognized that the mental image of these strip malls was highly dynamic.

This dynamism was largely attributed to individual perspective and human activity. I found my mental picture of these spaces shifting when I would change perspectives: on foot or in my car; standing in the parking lot or at the store fronts.

I also began to see individuals and their activities playing a role in my mental image of the space as well. Lack or abundance of people influenced my perception and motion. I began to contrast how I walked or drove through empty and full parking lots; I noticed carelessly placed shopping carts as edges.

After my preliminary fieldwork and early sketches, I started grappling with ways to engage these dynamic mental aspects of space. Slightly frustrated, I turned to the work of Edward Soja (Postmetropolis) and Iain Borden (Skateboarding, Space and the City). Both were provided insights and perspectives of space heavily informed by Henri Lefebvre.

Instead of focusing solely on the mental image of the strip mall, I wanted to identify the human activities in the space and account for any observations, no matter how mundane, as they came to me. I started to view the space as a dynamic construct. Not just the material thing I was moving through, or the mental image I had generated, but all of these things and the fluid nature of the space. Ideally, I wanted to investigate things that found little or no representation in online engagements of space.

In Skateboarding, Space and the City Borden posits that the focus of architectural histories should not be upon "things, effects, production, authorship or exchange[,]" but, instead, "process, possibilities, reproduction, performance and use" (265). Granted I'm not putting together an architectural history – I have an English degree and I like to make things on computers – but I felt that this shift of focus was equally apt in addressing the ways we engage our urban spaces online. In addition to directions, photos and reviews, why can't the markers on interactive maps or the content around them also account for things like possibilities or actual use?

Fieldwork

I conducted fieldwork at least four times at each site, save Belvedere Plaza, which I visited three times (it was quite far from where I live). Generally speaking, fieldwork was a precarious endeavor. Being a random guy with a clipboard, capriciously snapping photos invited a good deal of wary glances and, sometimes, unfriendly gestures.

Due largely to safety concerns, I seldom went after dark. I was really disappointed by that, because I know these spaces take on different characters depending on the time of day. That said, I was able to get a decent sampling of data during early morning, afternoon and late afternoon hours.

Initially I'd just drive out to the strip malls with a camera, the Gigapan robot, a clipboard and my brain. I would take a panorama of the strip mall and then walk around taking Lynch flavored notes. I would spend anywhere from one to three hours doing this.

After diving into the Lefebvre influenced work of Edward Soja and Iain Borden I altered my approach to fieldwork. Instead of focusing on my mental images of these spaces, I started collecting evidence of my subjective experience of the spaces. Having already taken panoramas on my initial visits, I left the gigapan behind. It was still the same camera and clipboard, just the brain had changed (slightly).

I walked the store fronts and noted basic quantitative data – store hours, independent/chain status, and general notes (if any) – and I took in the strip mall as a whole. I'd post myself at particular vantage points and take note of my personal impressions, human activities, and any general insights I had.

Building out

Once I'd concluded my fieldwork I had to figure out a way to arrange my findings in a compelling way. I had a good amount of data, but it was still a challenge figuring out what, exactly, to do with these notes, panoramas, pictures and numbers.

I knew that I was going to build a website and I knew that I wanted it to be extensible. The rationale behind the latter being that I wanted to provide a simple site infrastructure that could just as easily be applied to other projects, regardless of whether or not they involved strip malls.

After looking over other projects and applications I decided that I wanted maps, some graphs and an engaging means of navigating the data. It was imperative, seeing that I'm not really a programmer, that I find solutions that had basic functionality in place, but that allowed me to apply my own aesthetic flourishes.

Workflow

When I set out, I thought the technical aspects would be the most difficult dimension of the project. I was wrong on that count.

The coding and design did challenge me in new, and sometimes unanticipated ways, but the real challenge was keeping my overstimulated brain on task. Oftentimes I would set out to work on data entry and table formating and then get distracted for an hour or so designing icons. Workflow often depended on what I was particularly interested in doing on a given day. Sometimes I would abandon scheduled CSS fixes to write copy.

If anything, this project taught me a great deal about the importance of organization, modularity and self-discipline. All things I knew, but that are only improved in practice. It didn't take long for the personally imposed anarchy to get old and I adopted a structured, yet flexible, work schedule.

I took into account that I would be predisposed to work on certain things at certain times. Data formatting and entry, for instance, was most successful on Saturdays and Sundays after 7pm. I have no idea why, it just was. Early mornings were generally reserved for coding, afternoons for design, and writing at any or all other times.

Technical aspects

The site infrastructure is comprised of basic internet building blocks: PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS and JavaScript (jQuery). I created several iterations of site design comps, but found that the design and development of the site progressed symbiotically.

I developed a very basic content management system of PHP includes. Navigation is enabled by a PHP switch which uses a GET function pass a value for page content. This switch tells the central page template what sets of variables to include that then determine what style sheets, scripts and modules to include relative to the URL. All data are stored in MySQL tables and queries use generic variables that are passed in the variable include pages.

I'd never done anything like this before, but it was surprisingly easy to implement and it saved me a ton of time that would have been spent laying out multiple pages.

The user interface makes generous use of jQuery. I owe a great debt to Ariel Flesler for his amazing ScrollTo plugin. That enabled me to display all of my data in one place and facilitated an interesting way of engaging that data.

For graphs I used the Google Chart API and a small jQuery function I wrote that swaps the graph's source URL to give users a way to view empasized portions of the graph. I had seen a similar concept employed at Daytum.

Maps were made using the Modest Maps ActionScript 3 library. Tiles were provided from Cloudmade, which provides convenient access to OpenStreetMaps, a user-edited mapping service. Flowing Data's Walmart Visualization code was also instrumental in figuring out how to place the 208 strip malls I had in an XML file on the project maps.

The panoramas were made using the Gigapan Stitching software. Placing them within the site was really simple and the panoramas provide another interesting dimension to engaging the strip malls. They are hosted on Gigapan.org and all of my strip mall related panoramas are viewable on my Gigapan profile page.

Design considerations

As I'd mentioned before, the design of the site evolved simultaneously with the site development. While it allowed for a more organic process and cohesive aesthetic, it did create workflow headaches.

I had originally wanted to keep the site as minimally black and white as possible and employ large typographic flourishes for emphasis. This palette, or lack thereof, left an opening for the use of neon colors and collage to establish richer means of emphasis.

I wanted an aesthetic that borrowed from print traditions and took advantage of digital affordances. For instance, the design of the field notes section on the case study pages was heavily informed by my being surrounded by hand drawn maps, photos and notes for several months. I wanted to remediate the material elements that remained from my field work. The intended effect was to juxtapose a highly subjective element with the surrounding, tidy formal elements.

Getting into the details, I'm using a 960px grid that I whipped up and hacked away at myself. For fonts I'm using Garamond (>Palatino>Georgia>Times) for the majority of the site's content and Futura (>Helvetica>Arial) for some headers and special content.