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To move away from the teardown-and-start-over model, we must stop viewing strata-titled malls simply with nostalgia or tradable pieces of real estate, and start thinking of them as infrastructure to be strategically adapted. Government policies can help to nudge developers and other actors in this direction.<\/p>\n
1. Fractional adaptation<\/strong><\/p>\n The impasse of multiple failed collective sales highlights the need for a \u201cfractional adaptation\u201d approach. Instead of the all-or-nothing en bloc model, we should incentivise developers to buy into a building partially.<\/p>\n By strategically allowing for partial collective sales and offering adaptive reuse incentives \u2013 similar to those offered to the potential new owners of Golden Mile Tower last year during a collective sale exercise to nudge the conservation of the iconic cinema block \u2013 we can break the monolithic scale of the \u201cmega-block\u201d into independently-managed \u201cmicro cultural nodes\u201d.<\/p>\n This will allow more flexible responses to changing retail demands. It may even encourage the creation of spaces with organic human-scale qualities, like KOTE in Seoul, Sala Saneha in Bangkok and others in the region.<\/p>\n Adaptive reuse, even if partial, also addresses the massive environmental cost of embodied carbon, as retrofitting an existing building saves a carbon debt that new buildings take decades to repay.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n