Markets in the meadows: Department stores and shopping centers in the decentralization of Philadelphia, 1920--1980 (Pennsylvania)

This dissertation explores the role of consumer sites in the evolution of the "sprawl" landscape that dominates urban form in the United States at the end of the twentieth century. I examine this change in urban form through a case study of retail decentralization in the Philadelphia metropolitan region from 1920 to 1980. I argue that changing retailing strategies and consumer practices which began in the 1920s and found their full flowering after World War II caused retailers to abandon their investments in downtown Philadelphia. This crisis can be traced to the influx of finance capitalism and to attempts to make Philadelphia's Market Street into a retail center comparable to Fifth Avenue during the 1920s. The Depression brought a collapse in commercial real estate values in downtown Philadelphia that encouraged retailers and investors to consider commercial development in the suburbs. Early experiments in suburban shopping centers from the 1920s proved profitable once consumers accepted their presence in the suburban landscape, since these commercial sites violated the traditional home/commerce division of the classic suburb. The post-World War II period ushered in a rush to establish shopping centers in the suburban ring. Retailers attempted to create a sense of place and civic value in these new centers by replicating the downtown in a controlled, family-centered environment free of social disorder. By the mid-1950s, multiple suburban shopping centers in the region competed with each other and with the downtown for customers, which in turn caused declining patronage and investment in the downtown. During the 1960s and 1970s, Philadelphia policy makers adopted urban renewal strategies for the downtown modeled on the design and management strategies of suburban shopping centers. Though their intention was to reify the commercial supremacy of the downtown over the metropolitan region, the end result was a shopping center catering to its surrounding community. By 1980, Philadelphia's downtown increasingly targeted African-American and other minority communities on its borders, thus recognizing groups formerly seen only as potential service workers to be consumers too.