When most people imagine influential landscape design, they picture iconic parks, intricate plazas, or the elegant green spaces surrounding luxury residences. These are the projects discussed in classrooms, celebrated in award programs, and published in glossy design magazines.
Yet for most people, these are not the landscapes they experience on a daily basis. Instead, everyday nature is found in the parking lot medians of a grocery store, the planting strips outside a strip mall nail salon, the shaded walkways of a shopping center, or the courtyard between an apartment complex and a big-box retailer. Commercial landscapes are ubiquitous in everyday life and shape how millions of people encounter designed outdoor space yet are too often overlooked.
The Most Common Landscapes We Touch
Shopping centers, bigbox retailers, and mixeduse developments make up an enormous portion of the built world around us. In car-dependent suburbs, these types of commercial corridors provide the only reliable access to intentional landscape design many people interact with in a typical week.
People regularly pass through these spaces because they are necessary nodes in daily life: groceries, dining, or shopping. Through these “functional” trips, commercial landscapes quietly perform a significant cultural and ecological function.
A major shopping center in the Athens area that can serve as an example of a thoughtfully designed commercial node is the Alps Village shopping center located on the corner of Alps Road and Baxter Street. Interestingly, the parking lot of this shopping center has a collection of islands that are connected by crosswalks to create a safer solution for pedestrian travel. There are two main walkways created within the parking lot that go towards the Kroger and Burlington Coat Factory, businesses that are frequently visited in the strip mall. The central walkways are lined with canopy trees that shade the walkways during warmer months. These small, but intentional, design choices make this parking lot different from most other shopping centers in the Athens area and serve as an encounter with intentional landscape design for the average Athens resident.
Plants and Their Use in Commercial Landscapes
Because they are frequently visited, more often than parks, commercial landscapes have enormous potential to impact public perception of plants, whether through simple aesthetic beauty, ecological function, or seasonal change. Small considerations can be made to integrate these functions into the commercial landscape. For example, additional plant boxes and beds can turn a concrete plaza into an interaction with different plant species. Adding curb cuts into a parking island can transform it into a bioretention area designed to catch stormwater runoff.
Even something as simple as diversifying a plant palette can turn an everyday space into a landscape experience. A thoughtfully planted strip mall median becomes a small lesson in drought-tolerant design. A shopping center bioswale introduces passers-by to native grasses and pollinator habitats. Shaded pedestrian routes in outlet malls show how trees provide comfort outside of recreational spaces.
Commercial landscapes may be the only places where some people see a pink muhly blooming in the fall; where they notice a monarch butterfly; where they move through a cooling microclimate created by canopy trees. In communities that lack robust public green space, these landscapes essentially become public gardens.
However, commercial planting design can be misused in ways that negatively impact the experience of the users and their perception of landscape design in these applications. The Epps Bridge Centre is a large shopping center located just outside of Athens. The parking islands in this development are poorly designed in that the plant heights create a visibility issue when driving. This puts planting design in the forefront of a patron’s mind, but in the wrong way. This situation creates the need for more careful consideration for plant selection and further development of planning and design city ordinances.
What Can We Do as Landscape Designers?
Of course, commercial landscapes exist inside a difficult set of constraints. They are often developer driven and the design can be lacking in order to prioritize cost efficiency over ecological processes and aesthetic quality. They are often low maintenance by necessity, utilizing minimal irrigation and a simplified plant palette in protection of the bottom line and cost efficiency. They’re often inserted late in the construction process, or valueengineered down to the cheapest option.
Due to these pressures, many commercial sites are dominated by turf, mulch, and a limited variety of widely available shrubs. Yet landscape architects continue to create meaningful spaces within these constraints. Through smart plant selection and simple but intentional spatial design, they can elevate spaces that might otherwise be purely asphalt and concrete.
Innovative commercial landscapes show that impactful design doesn’t require complexity or a premium budget. Landscape architects employ techniques that we already know to reinforce the value of landscape design. They bring in strategies like using native and adapted plants that thrive with minimal maintenance. They integrate green infrastructure like rain gardens, bioswales, and stormwater planters that double as aesthetic amenities.
We already learn things like the impact of adding shade trees and purposeful pedestrian circulation throughout parking lots to reduce the effect of heat on people and the surrounding environment. And aiding in the pursuit of the bottom line, we can guide developers toward long-term cost savings through thoughtful planting that decreases maintenance over time.
Moving Toward the Future
With the rise of mixed-use developments, suburban town centers, and ever encroaching over-development, the line between commercial landscapes and public spaces is blurring. Landscape architects have a rare opportunity: design that reaches everyone, not just people who live next to a flagship park or high-end residence.
In a consumer-driven world, grocery store parking lots, strip mall sidewalks, and outlet mall promenades may be the places where people interact with nature most consistently. Recognizing the importance of these “ordinary” landscapes forces us to rethink what spaces are truly most important for landscape design.
