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Swedish 'Shopping' evolves at European center

By Edmund Mander

A search for retail innovation does not usually require a trip to the North Pole, but that's the direction to head to find one of Europe's first, and most interesting, malls.

One of Europe's first centers, aptly named Shopping, is in LuleÂ, Sweden.

The center, called Shopping, was built in 1955, a few kilometers short of the Polar Circle in LuleÂ, a Swedish city on the Baltic Sea.

"It was the first real shopping center in Europe, at least in Northern Europe," said Niklas Wikström, co-owner of Lillviken AB, a LuleÂ-based company. The firm, which was founded by Wikström's father, owns and manages commercial real estate in the northern region of Sweden, and at one time owned Shopping.

What sets the center apart, in addition to its location and age, is its designer. The mall was designed by Ralph Erskine, the British-born architect whose buildings have earned him acclaim across Europe for their innovative reflections of social and climatic challenges. Erskine was born in 1914, and moved to Sweden shortly before World War II.

Shopping is bristling with Erskine innovation and style, reflecting his fondness for sculpted and organic forms, according to Hans Tirsen, a partner in locally based Tirsen & Aili Architects. It is a multiple-use building, with the first three floors -- all underground -- devoted to retail, and the upper seven consisting of apartments and offices. Shopping also contained a cinema, offering visitors a recreational diversion decades before movie theaters and other entertaining diversions were welcome in shopping centers elsewhere. The cinema was moved in 1988 from the main mall to a smaller mall, called Lilla Shopping, which was built alongside the main center.

The idea of incorporating a movie theater into a mall was a revolutionary concept in the 1950s. Erskine's reasoning, according to Tirsen, was that "it's an arctic climate, and he thought people should move inside; he tried to create an indoor city with real streets and alleys," Tirsen said. "The intention was to make a winter city indoors, and a place to be, not only for shopping, but to meet each other."

The single-screen theater was like no other.

"The cinema is designed like a cave," according to Tirsen. "The projection room is like an egg, hovering inside, standing on legs."

LuleÂ, a city of about 70,000 people, was ripe for retail and entertainment initiatives at the time. It is a regional administrative and economic center of Norrbotten, a county that covers more than a quarter of Sweden's land area. It has the country's second-largest port, a major airport, and serves as a center for the Euro-Barents region, which has a population of 4.6 million. LuleÂ's economy is diverse, but is dominated by the metallurgical and steel engineering industry, and a growing information technology sector. Lule University, with about 8,000 students, also specializes in high-tech research on everything from lasers to cold climate technology.

More recently, city officials have focused on developing tourism and recreation opportunities. Besides touting the local countryside and a stunning archipelago, a coalition of city and private leaders have nurtured LuleÂ's entertainment offerings, from musical and drama festivals to a wide range of sporting activity. In 1996 local retailers and some of the city's larger real-estate owners linked up with local government officials to improve the town center, promoting its retail, restaurant and entertainment facilities, explained Wikström.

All this investment in LuleÂ's retail economy is paying off. Total annual sales have been reaching between SKR2.7 and SKR3.0 billion (about $330-$367 million),Wikström said. This is not so much due to the wealth of the city's inhabitants, but rather its importance to a wide geographical area. Shoppers come from up to 300 kilometers around, and the nearest city of comparable size is 270 kilometers away, he explained.

Shopping has also evolved considerably since its 1955 construction, when the city's population was 17,000. Today it contains three dozen tenants, dominated by fashion retailers. For most of the year, it is open six days a week, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. weekdays, and until 3 p.m. Saturdays. For four months of the year the center is open seven days a week. "The original purpose was to build a 'city within the city,' and it really was and still is," said Wikström, describing the center's large open spaces and stores as a kind of interior marketplace under an atrium. Stores and cafes take up 7,000 square meters (75,268 square feet), while there are 3,000 square meters of common area, 900 square meters of office space and 2,700 square meters of apartments.

But Shopping's fortunes did wane for a time, and it fell into disrepair during the early 1970s -- despite having about 40 staff on payroll whose sole task was to maintain it -- and many of the tenants left.

"The building was in a poor condition and business was bad," Wikström said.

In 1973 Lillviken bought the center from Oscar Fredrik Sjostrom, the original owner, for SKR9 million ($1.1 million), and set about revamping the place. For starters, it pared down the maintenance staff to three people, and initiated a major rebuild that, among other things, replaced some of the staircases with escalators and rebuilt the entrances.

With the improvements came new retailers, including the more prominent Swedish chain stores, such as H&M, the country's largest clothes store; Kapp Ahl, the second largest clothing chain; JC, a jeans and casual clothing store; and Stadium, a sporting goods and clothes chain, to name a few. There is also a Levi's store, a United Colours of Benetton, and a restaurant called Max Hamburgare (Sweden's second largest hamburger chain after McDonalds). The mall is also home to a nightclub.

Shopping has been regularly maintained and updated since then. In 1988 Lillviken built a smaller 3,000-square-foot building called "Lilla [little] Shopping" alongside the main center, housing a new cinema, stores and fast-food restaurants, connecting the two buildings via a passage. In 1991 four additional floors of offices and flats were constructed. These were built in the same style as a hotel that Erskine had originally planned to install above the center, before the project ran out of money.

But not all the changes made to Shopping over the years were in keeping with Erskine's design, according to Tirsen. In 1996 its owners took steps to correct some of the architectural deviations, using Tirsen & Aili Architects, in what became the biggest modernization of Shopping to date.

"All main exits/entrances, shop entrances, most shop interiors, all the public areas were rebuilt and also many of the shops' advertising signs were replaced," Wikström said.

Lillviken sold Shopping in 1997 during a real estate downturn. Today Shopping is owned by Norrporten AB, a company that acquires, develops and manages real estate in the province of Norrland, in the northern part of Sweden.

Norrporten's real estate portfolio consists of 169 offices, residential, retail and commercial properties in the counties of Gavleborg, Vasternorrland, Jamtland and Norrbotten. It owns and manages two other centers in northern Sweden, in the towns of Ume and Sundsvall. The book value of the company's real estate portfolio is SKR2,386 million ($292 million), of which about SKR2 million is in the form of undeveloped land.

The main, non-fast-food restaurants are gone today, partly because they could no longer compete with new establishments that opened up in the city center, according to Leif Löfgren, Norrporten's director for the northern region. But the fashion retailers, including Benetton, are thriving, helped by the four very distinct seasons that this region experiences. About 150,000 people live within the center's primary market sphere, he added.