Look carefully at the images above. On the left is La Habana Vieja, or Old Havana. It’s an entire city. And a great city... a UNESCO World Heritage Site, as a matter of fact. No US city has yet made that list. Renowned New Urbanist Andrés Duany calls Havana “Rome, 90 miles from Key West.”

   On the right is Sawgrass Mills Mall, not far from Miami, including its outparcels. In both cases, I’ve included the roads and port facilities required to make each place function.

   Here’s the kicker: both are shown at the same scale! The choice is almost unthinkable, but true: we can build a great city using less land than it takes to build a shopping mall!

   Kaid Benfield has a must-read blog post today entitled The Environmental Paradox of Smart Growth. It deals at length with the environmental benefits of building more compactly.

   But before the facts and figures, there’s the “blink test” written about incisively by Malcolm Gladwell in Blink, where he makes the case that a first glance is often more accurate than long deliberation. The first glance here shows there’s simply far more stuff in the city than in the mall, which is made up primarily of parking lots and roads. Simply put, most of what we build today is mostly empty most of the time.

   It’s not just about how full the land is, however, but about the character of what we’re building. Would you rather be in this picture, or at a mall?

   The choice is clear: spending time in a city that’s a World Heritage Site is a memory you’ll retain for a lifetime, whereas a trip to the mall will be forgotten by the weekend.

   What are some of the other “blink tests” we can do on cities versus malls? One really obvious one is that you can do almost anything you want in the city, while you can only shop at the mall. One of the Sawgrass Mills outparcels is a subdivision and another is the Bank Atlantic Center, which is the home of the Florida Panthers, but nobody ever walks between them and the mall. Want to go home? You’ve gotta drive. Want to go to work? You’ve gotta drive. Want to play ball? You’ve gotta drive.

   Here’s another test: What are the chances the shopping mall will be there in a hundred years? Malls, as we know, are usually thrown up with the cheapest construction, with no intention that they’ll last very long. How sustainable is it to be littering our landscapes with throwaway buildings? I blogged some time ago about Cancer of the City, and will have more to say about it shortly, some of which involves throwaway buildings and throwaway places.

   Meanwhile, Havana has been there for almost 500 years, and it’s easy to imagine it being there centuries into the future... provided that the next regime brings some financial prosperity. Castro’s revolution has impoverished Cuba so badly that most buildings have had no maintenance in the half-century since the revolution. But imagine what a shopping mall would look like in 50 years with no maintenance! Actually, it might be in a state of total collapse in less time than that if it were not maintained.

   It’s no accident that great and sustainable cities tend to be more compact than shopping malls and office parks. Compactness contributes both to sustainability and to potential greatness by bringing things closer together. A building in a parking lot isn’t a place... it’s only a building. And landscapes composed of buildings in parking lots connected by networks of highways are neither destined for greatness, nor for being here for a very long time.

   ~Steve Mouzon