2 The Design Competition as Public Engagement Method Merle Patchett and Rob Shields There is something very open, civic-minded and public spirited about a design competition.It catches the fancy of lay citizens, draws the attention of the news and engages the interests of potential donors and philanthropists, [and] stimulates young designers to devote their creative talents to developing innovative ideas. i How do you solve a problem like the strip mall? A typical response to such a question would be to investigate the economic, social and historical factors that have contributed to this building type being widely recognized as outdated, outmoded and failing. ii While this would certainly be worthwhile research – and indeed, this research frames our engagement with strip malls – we realize that perhaps users rather than academics or even designers are better placed to answer this question. Usually a single-storey, steel-framed building, from the 1930s the strip mall married street-front commer- cial construction with the aspirations to convenient automobile access. Built on greenfield locations as part of suburban, zoned development, strip malls have been located on collector routes at the entrances to subdivisions and housing develop-ments. Strip malls range from two or three stores to a multi-unit row of a dozen or more stores, generally fronted by off-street parking spaces. In some cases, there are larger chain- stores anchoring one end of the “strip.” The idea took off in the 1950s as a smaller version of the suburban mall, where a set of shops linked two anchoring stores, such as a department store and a large food store. As a business model, however, strip malls have suffered because they were unable to grow: chain stores tend to follow a logic of developing a clientèle, then integrating multiple stores into a single larger site at a more prom-inent location in the urban transportation network. Combined with covenants imposed on owners by these powerful chains to restrict the subse- quent re-use of locations by would-be competitors, many strip malls have seen much of their most valuable shop spaces stand vacant. This leads to a cycle of construction, use, abandonment and redevelopment that can stretch over 40 to 50 years but in which only the first periods are directly profitable to owners and desirable to communities. By the 1980s, many strip malls either stood abandoned or had many empty shops, a trend that continued to grow through the 2000s. The larger the strip mall, generally, the worse the situation. What to do with the strip mall? One of our mandates at the City-Region Studies Centre is to develop new forms of “public research” that posi- tion academia in new relations to diverse publics and professional communities. Our public research model is applied in both theoretical reflection and in the develop- ment of new models of participatory, community-based research and collective problem recognition. To address the problems associated with strip mall retail, the design competition presented itself as a new model for engaging practitioners and interested publics with the question of how strip malls could be re-imagined to reflect the needs of 21st century suburban communities. This competi- tion was developed as a way to launch research partially funded from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Architecture and design competitions have been subject to very little critical interest. iii Design historian Hélèn Lipstadt states that we need to understand how design competitions work and who they benefit, and thus to be able to implement best practices. This essay aims to address some of these concerns. By examining Strip Appeal, this essay demonstrates how the design competi- tion can be mobilized as part of a public engagement and public research method. StripFinalVersion.indd 2 12-11-09 11:36 AM