The Rise of the Small Box

It’s a cliché hardly worth noting. Big box stores swoop into new territory, push out smaller mom-and-pop stores, creating a homogenous, ubiquitous condition that erases local culture and disrupts economies. While sharing some of these same familiar dynamics, however, the “small box” poses a unique threat to the vibrancy of local communities. Dollar General is a key example of the small box. Its 7,400 square foot stores are instantiations of an interconnected infrastructure of distribution centers and interstate highways. This system’s efficiency allows each Dollar General store to capitalize on its context while thriving with an extreme amount of resiliency in conditions that other businesses and wholesalers find untenable. This allows Dollar General to wield considerable control over the towns and communities it infiltrates, making it a power center packaged in the small box, leveraging a nostalgia for the general store. This paper synthesizes work from an undergraduate design studio with faculty research that investigates a specific Dollar General location in a dying retail center. The specificity of this context reveals DG’s power in overcoming many common limitations of retail development. Utilizing James Corner’s ideas on mapping and Fumihiko Maki’s concepts of collective form, the work investigates the impacts the small box has on local communities, and imagines how architecture and its discourse on the city can develop productive responses. Architecture can make a unique contribution to understanding how and why this condition occurs and arm future practitioners and researchers with the tools they need to be projectively critical of the ever-changing urban context.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AIA.Inter.21.4

Volume Editors
Rico Quirindongo & Georgeen Theodore

ISBN
978-1-944214-39-5