Editorial
New Urbanism: From Single-Use to Climate Resilience
By examining the renewal dilemmas of Horton Plaza in San Diego, this explores how New Urbanism reshapes global cities through walkable scale, mixed-use development, and climate resilience.
Core argument
Beginning from the decline of the Horton Plaza shopping center in San Diego, this paper explores the deep contradictions in modern urban design: development models that are single-use, car-oriented, and disconnected from the street have struggled to adapt to the changing times. The observations of urban designer Howard Blackson indicate that mid-rise walkable buildings are more socially, economically, and environmentally sustainable than high-rise towers and suburban sprawl, while climate adaptation audits provide a governance framework for moving toward resilient communities. Under the dual pressures of globalization and the climate crisis, cities are shifting away from the pursuit of vertical height and monumental scale, returning to a rediscovery of streets, neighborhoods, and mixed-use functions.
Introduction: When Shopping Malls Become Urban Fortresses
In downtown San Diego, the once-bustling Horton Plaza shopping center is now a vast, half-empty structure. Born in the 1980s as an attempt to “return to downtown,” it transplanted the suburban shopping mall model into the urban core. In its first three decades, it was undoubtedly successful. However, by around 2010, shifts in business models and changes in consumer habits rapidly drained the vitality of this enclosed shopping center. More problematic still, it is not an ordinary commercial real estate predicament, but a textbook case of urban design failure: a “fortress” built for a single function and isolated from the surrounding street network.
Horton Plaza’s situation is not an isolated case. From North America to Europe, cities around the world face similar legacies: empty shopping malls, abandoned office parks, enclosed superblocks. Once seen as symbols of modernist progress, they have become the hardest-to-heal wounds in the urban fabric after this model’s shelf life ended.
The End of Single-Use
The core problem of Horton Plaza is that it was designed as an independent, privately managed, single large retail complex. Although located in the city center, it severed its connection to the surrounding public streets through closed interfaces and opaque pedestrian routes. The redevelopment directions proposed by urban designers—reconnecting streets and blocks, adding housing, introducing mixed uses—sound simple, yet they require coordinated adjustments across multiple levels, from municipal infrastructure and community planning to development financing and building codes. This is precisely the fundamental shortcoming of the single-use development model: it lacks the ability to renew itself and integrate with the city.
Successful redevelopment cases do exist. The Belmar project in Lakewood, Colorado, is often regarded as a best practice for shopping mall redevelopment. Rather than simply razing the site and starting over, it converted an enclosed shopping mall into an open community connected to the surrounding street grid, mixing residential, commercial, and public spaces. The reason such a transformation works is that it moves beyond single-function thinking and returns to the city’s most basic organizing unit—the street and the block.
A key insight is that a city is never completely “built.” When a city is filled with single-use buildings and blocks, obsolescence is inevitable. A truly enduring urban structure must allow for the fluidity of functions and the continuous adaptation of space. As urban designer Howard Blackson emphasizes, for places like Horton Plaza, “ruthlessly” demolishing those irregular buildings ill-suited to the long-term urban fabric—and restoring complete city blocks—may be more forward-looking than preserving all structures.
Building Typology and Urban CivilizationWhy are some urban forms inherently more adaptable and more capable of fostering civilized communities? Blackson offers a thought-provoking view: medium-density, four-story, elevator-free walkup buildings require only minimal planning rules—for example, building frontages facing the street and setbacks of less than one parking space—to naturally generate a mixed-use, pedestrian-friendly, transit-supporting urban form. High-rise towers and low-density detached houses, by contrast, require far more complex rules to "tame" them.
This is no accident. This building type, inherited from the pre-industrial era, possesses an inherent rationality of scale. It keeps population density below the threshold that requires elevators and large-scale infrastructure, while significantly reducing energy consumption and total building materials through shared walls and roofs. It brings doors directly to the street, strengthening social connections; it relies primarily on timber construction, reducing the use of concrete and steel. In contrast, towers and sprawling houses are inventions of modernism, serving automobiles, capital, and architectural spectacle more than people's everyday experience.
At a time of climate crisis and resource scarcity, this observation carries exceptional global significance. Many rapidly urbanizing regions are replicating North American suburban sprawl or Asian super-high-rises, yet often neglecting the wisdom of high-density, low-rise building that also exists in their own local traditions. The choice of urban form has never been merely a matter of aesthetic preference; it is a strategic decision concerning social equity, environmental efficiency, and long-term resilience.This transformation brings a new urbanist agenda: not nostalgia for history, but a rediscovery of the essence of the city. Streets, blocks, public spaces, mixed uses—these ancient elements become key resources for confronting future uncertainties. The meaning of design rules is not to restrict the freedom of people and space, but to create an order that allows civilization to endure. In such an order, cities can continue to evolve rather than fragment endlessly.
For decision-makers in global cities, this means a critical strategic shift: placing renewal and resilience thinking at the forefront. Rather than rebuilding after disaster, adjust in times of normalcy; rather than pursuing iconic skylines, repair the "invisible" underlying fabric; rather than clinging to single functions, embrace mixture and change. The redevelopment of Horton Plaza, however it is ultimately realized, should serve as a signal: a city's true resilience comes from its ability to be continuously re-woven into public life.
Conclusion
From the San Diego shopping center to climate adaptation audits, from discussions of building typology to urban strategies in the Global South, a common theme gradually emerges: we need to move beyond the single-use and large-scale development logic of the modernist legacy, toward a more meticulous, human-scale city-making.
Such a shift will not happen automatically. It requires new governance tools, financing models, and public participation mechanisms. But importantly, we possess sufficient historical experience and design principles as a starting point. Cities are never completely built; they are always in the process of becoming. Steering this process of formation toward a more civilized, more resilient, and more inclusive direction is the true mission of urban planning in our era.
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