Expanding shopping centres are one of the inevitabilities of urban life, like construction and oversized SUVs. Following the Bayshore Shopping Centre, the Rideau Centre shopping mall is planning to expand – but if it hopes to capitalise on Ottawa’s retail boom, it’s going about it the wrong way, with a combination of mediocre planning and a lack of vision.
The Rideau Centre announced a $250-million expansion in early October, which is set to include several new-to-Ottawa brands, such as J. Crew, Simons, and upscale department store Nordstrom.
While the plan includes plenty of conventional clothing stores, there has so far been no word of anything that might make the shopping centre particularly unique. As it stands, aside from a few quirky shops in the ByWard Market, nothing seems to set Ottawa apart enough to compete for retail-minded tourists, when compared to the variety of Toronto or the bargains in the United States.
For that matter, nothing the Rideau Centre has planned seems good enough to convince customers to brave the terrible traffic downtown, when they could settle for the merely bad traffic at Bayshore. The Rideau Centre’s predictable line-up of new stores will not do anything that other shopping centres are not doing bigger and better.
Furthermore, while the shopping centre is promising over 200 new jobs for the local economy, the plans seem counteractive to the Rideau Centre’s financial gain in the long term.
The expansion plan is set to take up part of the shopping centre’s parking space and as anyone who has attempted to drive downtown can tell you, finding parking is difficult enough as it is. No doubt using it as retail space is more profitable, as Ottawa stores can earn as much as $450 per square foot each year, but customers will need that space to park – and where are they supposed to go?
The Rideau Centre will acquire high-end stores, such as Victoria’s Secret, which suggests that the developers expect high-earning customers – and those are precisely the sort of customers who are more likely to own a car and need parking.
Finally, as a monumentally maddening pièce de résistance, the plans thus far have made no mention of a new layout. There will be new floors, they say, and new handrails. The interior will be completely redone, except for the shopping centre's eternally frustrating floor plan.
As it is, the twisting corridors of the Rideau Centre seem almost designed to confuse newcomers, and a little bit of organisation could go a long way. After wandering its halls for any length of time, it’s easy to empathise with lab mice in mazes – but at least they get cheese. Rideau Centre shoppers only get more confusion.
In fact, the entire plan reads like a puzzle. Whether they’re trying to accomplish anything substantial remains to be seen, because in the face of limitless potential in the downtown area, the Rideau Centre seems to be expanding into a bigger, equally bewildering version of itself.