Once home to Wal-Mart in Wisconsin Rapids, a 120,000-square-foot big-box retail shell is now home to the Centralia Center for Senior Citizens.  The town has revived and reinvented this empty space that threatened to leave a hole in the middle of their community and the neighboring shopping area.

As this USA Today article suggests, “America’s big-box experience is entering a new phase”, with this same problem becoming a growing concern for many urban areas across the U.S. The need to reuse the empty spaces left behind as large-scale retail moves on or goes under and re-enliven activity centers is driving creative solutions, with some turning these “hubs of capitalism into centers of civic life”.

As Wisconsin Rapids Mayor Carson says: "Local officials today have to be problem-solvers to survive. It might help local public officials to think as far out of the box as they can."  

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