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The first time cultural geographer Merle Patchett saw Edmonton’s sprawl from the airplane, she felt the culture shock shared by so many European immigrants to the Prairie city.

The place was built for the automobile: Endlessly sprawling suburbs, winding highways and, above all, strip malls.

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This month, Ms. Patchett, a native of Glasgow, Scotland, and the University of Alberta’s City Region Studies Centre have launched Strip Appeal. It’s a contest calling on designers, architects — anyone really — to retrofit the much-maligned strip mall for the future.

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“It’s just a rectangular box surrounded by a sea of empty space,” said Ms. Patchett. “It’s a really easy building to redesign.”

Crumbling, tacky and unloved, the bland 1950s-era strip mall remains the scourge of developers and urban planners alike.

They are seen as patches of “underperforming asphalt,” treading water until they can be swept aside in favour of pedestrian-friendly marketplaces or a multi-storey mix of offices, shops and condos plugged into a light-rail network.