Decentralizing Raleigh: Why Cameron Village Is Not a Village… Yet

Cameron Village was the first outdoor shopping mall built between DC and Atlanta.  One of the original decentralizing developments in Raleigh, it offered an alternative to shopping downtown.  Though envisioned as containing single family housing, apartments, retail and restaurants, the development fundamentally ignores traditional growth patterns and follows the engineered formulas of urban sprawl, separating uses by zone.

In other words, it’s not a village.  But why then, does the name suggest that it is a municipality, or even suggest that it functions as one?  What does that tell about its motives?

The motives are actually quite clear.  It is not meant to be a village.  It is meant to attract consumers.  The buildings are arranged in a classic sub-urban strip mall fashion: multiple tenant, stand-alone structures are surrounded by surface parking, designed for the convenience of the motorist.  Though not integrated with the types of uses in Cameron Village, most of the surrounding neighborhoods are residential.  However, the demand of the types (and quantity) of boutiques and high end retail outlets located there is not meant to be satisfied by these residents.  (While its largest tenant, a Harris Teeter Supermarket, does work to this end, its business income is nowhere near satisfied by people who walk to the store.)  The fact that 95% of patrons have to drive automobiles from somewhere else to shop there makes Cameron Village a destination, as opposed to a sustainable part of the neighborhood which surrounds it.  The property, valued at around $120 million, brings its owner—represented by a dummy corporation in San Antonio—around $6 million net per year in rent.  It is a privately owned entity, not an urban political unit, as its name would suggest.

Cameron Village lacks the fundamental element of a village: the residential component (which distinguishes the urban core.)  Even if there were integrated condominiums there, similar to the type of development happening in the North Hills Mall area, the people that work at the shops there would never be able to afford to buy these condos.  (So, there would still be a large divide with any realistic sustainable neighborhood.)  At best, the people that live at North Hills shop and eat there at night, but still have to drive to and from work each day.  Take a look at the recent and ongoing renovations.  We could spend hours ripping into the EIFS-encrustation that is occurring in Cameron Village at present (which is actually an improvement from the stark white repetition of the bubbled translucent canopies and glowing blue of the homogenizing shop signs that preceded.)  With a few exceptions, these ‘updates’ have done little to improve the planning and infrastructural problems that hold Cameron Village back from realizing its potential.

There is much literature on urban sprawl and speculation into its origins.  Perhaps the most widely read is the manifesto set forth by the New Urbanists, Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream.  Andres Duaney and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, who spearheaded the New Urbanist movement and penned the book, attribute the so-called ‘origin’ of sprawl to several post-WWII legislations imposed by the Federal Government in conspiracy with General Motors and (basically) oil tycoons.  Their proscriptive theoretical standpoint exemplifies a sort of sprawl-hating attitude that has become increasingly accepted by liberal architects, planners, and citizens. 

The popularity of blaming sprawl for our country’s problems and the issues facing our environment is growing.  Robert Bruegmann, in his book Sprawl: A Compact History offers a different paradigm that has been greatly expanded upon in a study by Joel Kotkin titled The New Suburbanism.

Bruegmann agues that the occurance of sprawl is a pattern of growth that is as old as the industrialized city, and that the extension of it to the middle class is the event that we are experiencing today.  Through historic and contemporary examples, he goes on to prove that sprawl not only began in Europe, but is as bad or worse in some EU countries today as it is in the United States.  His findings reaffirm a critical approach to the problem of sprawl: realizing and accepting the situation and working to better our suburban landscape is more constructive than focusing on condemning our (like it or not) way of life and prescribing fixed solutions for new development.  Bruegmann writes:

“Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax… It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something much more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policy.”

Joel Kotkin accepts these conclusions as a premise in his 2005 study, subtitled A Realist’s Guide to the American Future.  He suggests the emergence of Suburban Villages, rooted in Howard’s Garden Cities, where urban cultural and other uses begin to infiltrate suburban landscapes as functional diversity increases over time (as part of a sort of evolution of growth.)  Both authors see suburbia not necessarily as a problem, but as a foundation and infrastructure for tomorrow’s urban landscape.

Though it represents fundamentally flawed urban planning in its decentralization of a then small yet vibrant downtown, Cameron Village was an innovative development in its original form.  It was new, fresh, and exciting to the people of Post-WWII Raleigh.  As environmental awareness elevates, perhaps Cameron Village will take the lead once again, as the Kotkin suggests, slowly increasing its density, rezoning and rebuilding in parts and adding new uses, and petrifying into Raleigh’s first authentically grown Suburban Village, sustained by its surrounding neighborhood, with less dependence upon the automobile.

Sears at Cameron Village, 1950.  Note the Modernist Style of the original development. 

Cameron Village, 1980s renovation. 

Cameron Village Library Renovation, Cherry Huffman Architects.  image credit: JWest Productions

other image credits: Cameron Village: A History 1949-1999, Nan Hutchins (2001)

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