The next town over from mine, Cherry Hill, N.J., has nothing that resembles a downtown.

A sleepy farming community until the post-World War II suburban boom, what was then called Delaware Township became the home of the East Coast's first enclosed shopping mall in 1961.

While still a major draw for thousands of shoppers from South Jersey and Philadelphia, which is across the Delaware River, the mall has remained just that -- a suburban mall, surrounded by strip malls, surrounded by thousands of single-family houses and apartments.

About 70,000 people live in Cherry Hill -- renamed, according to the township's website, for the mall. At long last, however, the township is actually getting a center -- mixed-use on the site of former racetrack -- at an estimated cost of $500 million.

It is highly unlikely that the town center will replace the Cherry Hill Mall in its importance to both the township and the region.

In other areas of the country, however, competition for retail dollars is forcing the redevelopment of many obsolete malls into town centers with housing, hotels, civic and cultural facilities, public gathering places, and pedestrian-friendly streets.

The Urban Land Institute has published a booklet, Ten Principles for Rethinking the Mall, which outlines the institute's thinking about how redevelopment can best be carried out.

Redevelopment of malls must be tailored to fit community needs, the mall site, as well as market demands, the booklet suggests.

Each site is unique and revitalization will require an understanding of the current and future competitive position in the local market, as well as an analysis of financially realistic redevelopment opportunities, according to the booklet.

Several examples include: tearing down the old mall and building something completely different; rebuilding a newer mall; reconfiguring, expanding, or downsizing the old mall; turning the mall inside out to create an outdoor experience; creating a hybrid indoor-outdoor center; adding other uses as part of the mix; creating a lifestyle, power, or off-price complex; or a town center.

"A number of factors may further complicate the decision about what to do, such as the necessity of keeping the mall open during redevelopment," said Michael Bayard, a senior resident fellow at ULI.

These include "the cost of keeping tenants in business while reconstruction goes on around them; and the need to accommodate public uses, linkages, amenities, and connections to the surrounding neighborhoods that didn't previously exist."

Three malls in the Washington, D.C. region -- Landmark Mall in Alexandria, Va.; Wheaton Plaza in Wheaton, Md., and the Landover (Md.) Mall -- were examined by a team of ULI experts from around the country to assess sites that were struggling to stay competitive and to provide ways to revitalize them.

Their research came up with the 10 principles: