Spirit Halloween, the king of seasonal Halloween pop-up stores, has turned the suburbs into a maze of animatronics and costumes galore. But a spooky secret lies beneath their overwhelming amount of retail locations. 🎃

In addition to their massive plastic waste and fast fashion labour exploitation, Spirit Halloween stores reveal and take advantage of the detrimental urban planning practices haunting our communities. The Suburban Experiment gone wrong!

Since the dawn of the retail apocalypse, big box stores and malls have gone out of business, leaving behind a mass of abandoned storefronts. This might be a great thing for people who like to look at spooky props and robot clowns for 3 months out of the year, but it’s fatal to the communities that are left with massive vacant buildings, useless infrastructure, and dead malls. And while Spirit Halloween isn’t making the physical retail spaces from scratch, their monopoly-like model of swooping in with short-term leases and then leaving might not be as good for the cities as you might think.

In this video essay, we explore the memes and urban planning practices that make Spirit Halloween both a beloved part of our Halloween season and a chilling reminder of the flaws in our retail landscape. We also take a tour of Woodbine Mall and Honeydale Mall in Toronto to discuss the impact of abandoned retail on the people that live around them.in Toronto to discuss the impact of abandoned retail on the people that live around them.

Happy halloween everyone!

#SpiritHalloween #RetailApocalypse #urbanplanning ‪@strongtowns‬

Strong Towns:
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Website: https://www.strongtowns.org/
Rachel's Spirit Halloween Article: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2...


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