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MIT Press
December 2008
On Sale: November 30, 2008
220 pages
ISBN: 0262033798
EAN: 9780262033794
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
America is becoming a container landscape of big boxes
connected by highways. When a big box store upsizes to an
even bigger box "supercenter" down the road, it leaves
behind more than the vacant shell of a retail operation; it
leaves behind a changed landscape that can't be changed
back. Acres of land have been paved around it. Highway
exits lead to it; local roads end at it. With thousands of
empty big box stores spread across America, these sites
have become a dominant feature of the American landscape. In Big Box Reuse, Julia Christensen shows us how ten
communities have addressed this problem, turning vacated
Wal-Marts and Kmarts into something else: a church, a
library, a school, a medical center, a courthouse, a
recreation center, a museum, and other civic-minded
structures. In each case, what was once a place to shop has
become a center of community life. Christensen crisscrossed America identifying these
projects, then photographed, videotaped, and interviewed
the people involved. The first-person accounts and color
photographs of Big Box Reuse reveal the hidden stories
behind the transformation of these facades into gateways of
community life. Whether a big box store becomes a "Senior
Resource Center" or a museum devoted to Spam (the kind that
comes in a can), each renovation displays a community's
resourcefulness and creativity—but it also raises questions
about how big box buildings affect the lives of
communities. What does it mean for us and for the future of
America if the spaces of commerce built by a few monolithic
corporations become the sites where education, medicine,
religion, and culture are dispensed wholesale to the
populace?
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