As the sun peeked out from behind the clouds at 9:30 a.m. on the day after a rainy Saturday, the strollers at Runway Playa Vista rolled in. Giggles echoed in a nearby play area where children twisted knobs and spun a wheel in a car-like play structure. Toddlers whizzed by on scooters as parents chatted about the struggles of parenting during a rare L.A. storm.

Their solution to kids with pent-up energy wasn’t to head to any park — it was to come to a mall park. Or rather, the turf fairway and play structures that sit just outside storefronts at this southwest Los Angeles “shopping center.”

“My older daughter does dance right here, so this is a Sunday routine for us,” said Daniel LaBare, who sat with his Whole Foods shopping bags by the play car with his younger daughter, 2-year-old Ellie. “She goes to dance, and we hang out and play.”

With the rise of e-commerce, it’s no secret that retail developers have had to get creative to keep attracting customers. One method that seems to be working? Catering to families by making green turf and other kid-friendly spaces a mall centerpiece.

Some of these areas are just patches of turf with Adirondack chairs — popular with exploration-minded toddlers, or kids with a ball. But there are also shopping centers with more elaborate play structures, such as Rancho Cucamonga’s Victoria Gardens “Orchard Play Area” (“near Shake Shack and Silverlake Ramen,” according to the website). The lawns often serve as activity centers where malls hold kid concerts, adult exercise classes and Christmas tree lighting events.

“More and more centers are moving away from just transactional spaces, and they’re moving towards community destinations,” said Paul Chase, president of JLL Lifestyle Property Management, a commercial real estate developer and investment firm that owns shopping centers across the globe. In November, it refocused Chase’s division from “retail” to “lifestyle” — a semantic change that reflects a shifting focus. The division now manages retail spaces as a place to spend time, not just shop, whereas it previously focused on the latter. Chase said the industry name for the landscaped places where kids play and families gather is “entertainment zones.”

One JLL Property, Manhattan Village in inland Manhattan Beach, underwent a renovation in 2021 that transformed a flat parking lot into an “entertainment zone” featuring a turf lawn with benches, fountains and short rolling hills. On any given weekend, toddlers can be seen summiting the “hills” to stick their fingers in the water features while parents sip coffee from the cafe that sits at the west end of the green space.

Just across Rosecrans from Manhattan Village in El Segundo, families flock to the Point, the South Bay’s first mall- turned-park development, which opened in 2002. Fresh from soccer games, kids kick a ball on the same patch of turf where babies crawl and families picnic — with food purchased from the mall’s restaurants, including Mendocino Farms and Cava. Conceived as “the South Bay’s living room,” the Point’s “anchor tenant” would not be a department store, explained Jeff Kreshek, a senior vice president and western region president and chief operating officer of the Point’s parent company, Federal Realty. It would be 45,000 square feet of open space.

“If you look at traditional malls, there’s a commerce aspect, and they threw in some places for you to sit down,” Kreshek said. “So it was kind of reverse engineering what shopping centers had been for decades.”

Charlotte Nguyen, center, and her friends do craft activities on the lawn during a Lunar New Year celebration at the Point in El Segundo, on Sunday, February 22, 2025.

(Stella Kalinina/For The Times)

There are plenty of parks in these neighborhoods, and parents say they bring their children to public playgrounds, too. But they come to Runway, the Point or Manhattan Village because of the convenience of having nearby food, beverage and shopping options as their children play.

Convenience has yielded community. Daniel LaBare’s daughter goes to preschool nearby, and they frequently run into classmates’ families at Runway.

“She’ll see at least one or two people who she knows here today,” LaBare said. “This is our community as far as I’m concerned.”

Tori Kjer, executive director of parks management and advocacy organization LA Neighborhood Land Trust, is all for it.

“We are 100% supportive of gathering spaces of all shapes and forms because we believe those are the critical places where community members have a chance to come together and meet and celebrate,” Kjer said.

The combination of shopping and green space is by no means a new phenomenon. Catherine Nagel, executive director of parks equity organization City Parks Alliance, points out that where parks go, shopping often follows. It’s a symbiotic relationship where parks attract families, and then families can get the provisions or fulfill the errands they need to further enjoy the park. That’s a recipe for a healthy community.

Twin sisters Emma and Ella Sandoval, left, greet the character Mei Mei at the Point during a Lunar New Year celebration. Kids and parents participate in craft activities at the celebration on Sunday, February 22, 2025. (Stella Kalinina/For The Times)

Parks — like retailers — have also begun to offer more activities in recent years, said Nagel. So retailers and the stewards of public lands (whether that’s the city or the nonprofits that often manage parks) are learning from each other.

“There’s a lot of attention now to activating these [public] spaces in a way that will bring people to them,” Nagel said, referencing activities like salsa dancing in Bryant Park in New York that use park land for structured public gatherings. “Because if you don’t activate them, they can quite often become places where unhealthy, unproductive activity takes place.”

At the same time, a mall park’s green space is not truly public.

“It’s totally fine and great if private property owners want to create gathering spaces in their malls, but there’s no replacement for a robust city park system that has green spaces with trees and lawns and play structures and just places for people to gather,” Kjer says. “The beautiful thing about parks is they are open to everyone. They are intended to be safe spaces for people to protest, to celebrate, to go about their daily lives, without any stigma or worry about being asked to leave.”

At a park, visitors are citizens or patrons. At the shopping center entertainment zone, they’re customers.

“It comes down to dwell time,” Chase said. “The longer that people stay in a center, of course the more money they’re going to spend.”

But families say the mall aspect doesn’t bother them. After all, this generation of parents are the millennials and Gen X-ers who grew up socializing at the mall a la Cher Horowitz in “Clueless.” Now, as parents, the convenience, manicured turf and camaraderie offers something valuable for them in this season of their lives.

“You can let them run, and do your shopping, so everyone wins,” said Charlotte Ahles, who was playing at Runway with 2-year-old daughter Chloe. She pulled at her mom’s pants, towards the Micro Kickboard store directly across from the play area.

“Scooter, scooter,” Chloe said.

“The scooter store isn’t open yet, honey,” said Ahles.