Throughout the United States, the problem of what to do with abandoned strip malls is a serious issue. Even as developers were building these dime a dozen complexes, the next best site was right around the corner. We've seen it time and time again - communities stuck with vast unusable land and derelict properties. Some of these strip malls are smaller, consisting of a handful of businesses. But even the smaller scenarios can present major reuse dilemmas. Then there are the much larger forsaken developments, such as Buffalo's Central Park Plaza, that can scar neighborhoods indefinitely.

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UB Architects Win International Competition With Plan to Give Old Strip Malls Back To the People [from archinect.com]

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Two faculty members in the University at Buffalo School of Architecture and Planning have won an international design competition with their proposal that the public be given free rein to take over derelict strip mall sites like Buffalo's Central Park Plaza and design and build their own urban communities in a manner that would be, they say, "not unlike the settling of the American frontier."

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