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Shopping Centers Today -> April 2002
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GERMANY’S SPACE PARK MIXES SCIENCE AND STORES
By Susan Thorne
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| A 250-foot-high Ariane 5 rocket will serve as a beacon for Space Park. |
Sometime this summer, a 250-foot Ariane 5 space rocket will be erected on the banks of the Weser River outside Bremen, northern Germany. The Ariane (the European Community’s space rocket) will serve as an eye-catching landmark for Space Park, a groundbreaking themed entertainment and retail center. Space Park plans to go where no man has gone before on this continent, with the combination of Europe’s largest indoor theme park and an adjoining shopping center.
The project, under development by Space Park Development, a subsidiary of Köllmann, Wiesbaden, Germany, is set to open in October. It will comprise a 185,804-square-meter (2 million-square-foot) entertainment facility based around the theme of space exploration and will be attached to a shopping center with 70,000 square meters of retail space. The latter will include 120 shops and 40 restaurants, cafés and bars; a 3,000-square-meter fitness and health center; a 14-screen multiplex cinema; and a 162-room hotel. The development is located on a 26-hectare (64-acre) landscaped riverside park site formerly occupied by dockyards.
Bremen, a city of 560,000 inhabitants, was chosen as the location because of its position as an important European aviation and space technology center. It is host to the headquarters of Astrium, the European space agency.
The founder of the project is Wolfgang Wilke, a nuclear physicist whose enthusiasm for outer space exploration drew him into a leading role in the development. As Space Park senior project manager, Wilke is enthusiastic about the scientific value of the “edutainment” that will be offered.
“We don’t want to be a science center,” he said, “but we describe facts, then bring them into entertainment.”
The Space Center, which houses the entertainment attractions at Space Park, will offer a variety of technical displays, movies and rides.
Project architects RKW Rhode Kellermann Wawrowsky, Düsseldorf, have created a sophisticated, modern look for Space Park’s buildings and open spaces. The whole site resembles a launch pad, while the Space Center looks like a flying saucer.
The same goes for the enclosed mall next to the Space Center, with its high-ceilinged, hangar-like design; a canopied entranceway will draw visitors in from the street and parking lot and lead them past the retail stores of the Star Walk promenade toward the Ariane Plaza overlooking the Weser River, where there will be eateries and a “try and buy” area for a major sports equipment retailer. People will be able to visit the shopping area and riverbank terrace without paying admission to the Space Center, and they are intended to become destinations in their own right.
Space Park will be served by direct public transport connections from the Bremen airport and from the city center (about 10 minutes away), including a boat shuttle service to downtown in warmer months. Bremen is also located on Highway A1, a main route between western Europe and Scandinavia.
The developers of this project are keenly aware that they are pioneers in uncharted territory. First, because of the indoor character of their entertainment offering (a concession to northern German weather); second, because they plan to combine retail with entertainment in an unprecedented way on a large scale in Europe.
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It’s been a tough sell from the development perspective, said Wolfgang Kiesel, a Hamburg-based consultant to the project for Jones Lang LaSalle, the international commercial real estate management and investment services firm.
“The business community is very conservative in Germany,” he said. “It’s been a very difficult, slow process to try and bring entertainment and shopping together.”
Wooing the Continental consumer raises other issues. A U.S.-style and U.S.-scale themed entertainment park might not work well in Germany, said Bill Gorgensen, Space Park Development’s head of design, who has previously worked with Disney, explaining some distinctions between Space Park and the U.S. model. In Europe, consumer demand for themed and amusement park attractions is not as strong as in North America, he said. Europeans tend to be less media-oriented, with fewer hours spent watching TV and more leisure time devoted to family activities, particularly on national and religious holidays. Lars Klatte, a partner at RKW, added that Europeans have much more vacation time than North Americans (between 20 and 30 vacation days a year is not unusual for German employees) and as a result, cannot spend as much per capita per vacation day.
“Consequently, we wouldn’t have enough customers for a large-scale, high-entrance-fee-type park,” Klatte said.
The balance of retail and entertainment must also be different from that favored in North America, he said, with more retail and restaurants, and less entertainment.
Space Park’s target market is the average family member, 6 to 45 years old, living within a two- to three-hour drive, a catchment area that includes roughly 31 million people. Space Park Development’s market research shows that 35 percent of Germans would visit a themed attraction such as the Space Center; Dutch respondents were even more enthusiastic, according to Wilke. (The German border with The Netherlands is less than 100 miles from Bremen.) Wilke predicts there will be about 1.5 million visitors per year to Space Park, with average stays of four hours in the Space Center and an additional two hours or so in the mall and other areas.
One unknown quantity, however, is the retail side of the equation. According to Jones Lang LaSalle’s Kiesel, Space Park has tenants for a substantial part of the retail area, but he declined to disclose who they are. He did reveal, however, that the retail mall will be operated as a specialty retail center without traditional anchors, focusing on leisure-related merchandise and such services as books, electronics, sports and outdoor equipment, plus dining venues. Wilke suggested that travel agency Thomas Cook, which sells bookings for flights to the moon, would be a good fit with the space theme.
Space Park’s retail lineup is constrained by an agreement with the city of Bremen, which paid for some of the waterfront landscaping. In exchange, Space Park Development was required to incorporate a merchandise mix offering minimal competition to retailers in downtown Bremen. This means no stores that sell primarily merchandise for daily needs, such as a supermarket, no building or home goods retailers and no duplication of department stores located downtown. Since Kaufhof and Karstadt, two leading German department stores, both have locations in central Bremen, this narrows the field for anchors considerably; hypermarkets, another frequent mall anchor in Germany, are also ruled out.
Dr. Rainer Lademann, retail consultant heading the firm of Lademann & Partner, Hamburg, defended the idea of a no-anchor center.
“We can see several shopping centers in Europe which don’t have an anchor,” he said, citing the 55,000-square-meter Potsdamer Platz, one of central Berlin’s best-known malls, as an example. Nonetheless, Kiesel acknowledged that the idea of a center without an anchor is “very controversial” and still under discussion by the developers. Further details can be expected as Space Park’s October blast-off date approaches. Meanwhile, construction of Space Park is more than 70 percent complete and ahead of schedule for some components.
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