Mall Profile #8: City Square Shopping Centre, by Justin McElroy

City Square Shopping Centre
Location: Vancouver
Opened: 1989
Approximate number of stores: 50
Anchor tenants: Dollarama, Daiso, Sungiven

(To listen to our podcast on City Square Shopping Centre, click here)

It just so happens that our next mall being profiled in this anthology podcast series comes days after the re-opening of Oakridge Mall: a multi-billion dollar redevelopment that provides unlimited floor space, untold luxury, dreams of the future, and folks hyping up all aspects of the TimeOut food court as though it were Christmas and Thanksgiving all rolled into one.

City Square Mall is not that. 

Since it opened 37 years ago, the smallish mall across the street from Vancouver’s City Hall has never really made the news (aside from a couple of times on screen that we’ll get to), lacks the type of anchor tenants that inspire fevered excitement from influencers, and might be most noteworthy as the place where government and health care workers take a lunch break.

But we don’t judge malls on what they hope to symbolize, or how aspirational they are, we judge them by what they tangibly are, and how well they achieve their purpose. 

And while not amazing, City Square does what it’s trying to do pretty well.

That City Square exists at all is a bit of a fluke: by the mid 1980s, the Model School and Normal School, two granite and sandstone testaments to early Vancouver Edwardian civic ambition, had been slowly decaying and mostly abandoned. If this was 2014, two old educational facilities sitting in a highly desirable plot of land between City Hall and Vancouver General Hospital may well have been turned into mixed-used high rises with a Tim Horton’s and a currency exchange on the ground floor, but instead it was turned into a small mall, with a Safeway as the anchor tenant. The exteriors of the two buildings were saved, but rather than serve as the outside facade to a modern structure, they became some of the inside hallways and retail spaces within the mall, linked by a large glass atrium, making for a fascinating space that won local kudos and external architectural awards.

It also made for a unique filming location for two very 90s pieces of media: City Square Mall was home to the climactic scene in The X-Files episode "Tooms," where a mutant serial killer built a nest beneath the escalators. It had a larger role in the 1994 film TimeCop, the Jean-Claude Van Damme time-travel action film in which the future is apparently accessible via a mall in the Cambie corridor, and Van Damme demonstrates an iconic sidekick next to a 1994 Nissan. One could focus on the fact that City Square worked in both X-Files and TimeCop because it has a certain universal airy mall look that worked very well in the 1990s, and that it hasn’t been seen in media much since, possibly because Vancouver’s role as playing generic global cities doesn’t lend a quirky and somewhat dated but interesting mall to be shown on screen in 2026.

Or you could just point and say “Hey that’s our city!”

Decades move on and architectural trends change, but City Square has continued to be a neighbourhood mall that serves up the basics for families in west mount Mount Pleasant, city workers on their lunch break, Blanche Macdonald students who need bubble tea between classes. A Kin's Farm Market, Dollarama, Starbucks and dentist add to the sense that this is a mall you go for not for fun, but as utility, as infrastructure, as the place you go because it has everything you need without having to navigate the massive Canadian Tires and Best Buys at the base of the Cambie Bridge or wander hundreds of metres down Broadway.

In other words, it does what a small mall needs to do, and does it with visual flourish, even if nobody who doesn’t need it is paying attention. 

City Square is not Oakridge. It has never tried to be Oakridge. What it is though is a thoughtful piece of Vancouver civic history that also happens to sell you fresh produce, be a place to get some Pad See Ew before city council reconvenes, and — if you know where to look — once served as the stomping grounds of television's most memorable liver enthusiast. In a city that loudly tries to play the rest of the world so often, it has become a very quiet example of something distinctly Vancouver.

TOTAL SCORE

Small Stores: 5.3/10 (We’ve got dentists and swords, acupuncture and liquor stores, the very fun Catch Q claw machine game and…well, not much more, but certainly a bunch of other things that are fairly useful for a small mall, if not particularly exciting)

Anchor Tenants: 4.3/10 (Sungiven, Daiso and Dollarama will never be anyone’s idea of attractions to a fun destination mall, but they’re all inherently usable, affordable, and fit neighbourhood needs. It’s not great, but it’s not awful either)

Food Court: 6.7/10 (Smack dab in the middle of the mall, the 10-15 outlets are a nice mix of Vietnamese, Thai and Persian small businesses, along with simpler fare from A&W or a salad bar. A new Takoyaki place is a nice surprise, and adds to an underrated food court, even if its options are somewhat limited and most things are good but not great)

Design/Accessibility: 8/10 (Unlike any other mall in the region, with the heritage buildings embedded within giving a sense of being inside and outside at the same time, and a straightforward and relatively intuitive square navigation, even if the top floor suffers from a few too many stairwells that go nowhere. Bonus points for the unique view of city hall from the third floor patio, and the fun design flourishes from the stained glass windows to the lighting that all adds to the overall effect.)

X-Factor: 6.9/10 (One can over indulge the design traits of City Square, but it functions both as a unique mall and one that does a good job with the meat and potatoes necessities required for a neighbourhood mall, a hard combination to pull off, and one that makes it fun to be in.)

OVERALL: 31.3/50 (All of which makes it a great example of what a small mall can and should be, even if there’s little in the retail options that will spark joy. But the design certainly does, and it gives the retail options that ultimately are essential to any mall, and as such achieves its purposes. Malls should be judged relative to its size and expectations, and City Square delivers fairly well.)