"The consumer today is, at every chance available, choosing a shopping environment that is almost anti-mall," says Brian leary, Vice President of Design & Development for Atlantic Station, LLC. He attributes that anti-mall attitude to a shift in pop culture, among other things. "The big retail boom really got its legs in the '70s and '80s with the invention and the perfection of the suburban shopping mall," he says. "Our society related to that mega-mall because our society was a suburban-based society. Look at all our shows: Family Ties, Alf, The Golden Girls — those were the hit shows, and they were all based in suburbia. The suburban response for retail was the mall."

In more recent years, Leary points our, today's TV hits reflect a different, more in-town lifestyle. "One after the other — Friends, Ally McBeal — the whole shift [in pop culture] has been more urban focused." To keep up with the changes in consumer attitudes, retailers are responding by overhauling strip center, malls are bringing the outdoors inside, and communities are successfully reclaiming brownfields (tracts of land that have been developed for industrial purposes, polluted, and then abandoned) for retail opportunities. Village centers and Main Street projects now dominate the drafting tables.

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