Strip/Appeal: reinventing the strip mall

Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and innovative spatial thinkers.


Initiated by the City-Region Studies Centre, University of Alberta, Strip/Appeal is an ideas design competition, and travelling exhibit, intended to stimulate and showcase creative design proposals for the adaptive reuse of small-scale strip-malls.

In many neighborhoods across North America, small 5-8 store strip-malls, once anchors of local retail activity, have become today’s suburban blights: envisioned as community hubs of consumption and services, many of these places are being abandoned, becoming underutilized and dilapidated as the services move out of local neighborhoods in favour of larger-scale shopping districts serving greater catchment areas.

We ask: How might the small-scale strip be reinvented and redeveloped to local advantage?

With creative thinking and design experimentation, we believe there are many ways to transform these ever-present yet ailing built forms to promote walkability, sustainability and community as suburban experience.

Got a great idea? Visit the competition website www.strip-appeal.com

The deadline for submission is Nov 30, 2011.

The outcome of the competition will be the creation of a travelling exhibit and bookwork (published by the University of Alberta) that will tour planning departments and architecture/design schools across North America throughout 2012.