Central City Shopping Centre

Central City is a genuine rarity among shopping centers: a Simon Fraser University campus building sits directly inside it, occupying 33,000 sqm of the podium floors, with classroom hallways looking straight down onto the mall’s central atrium. The complex began in the 1970s as a standalone Surrey Place Mall, owned and managed by the Insurance Corporation of British Columbia, before losing ground through the 1990s to the newer Guildford Town Centre across town.

A late-1990s sale triggered the redevelopment that created the current Central City: a postmodern integration of retail and education designed by architect Bing Thom, highlighted by a vaulted timber galleria and a glass office tower. SFU’s Surrey campus opened above the mall in 2006 and has since expanded to more than 600,000 sqft of campus space. The tower was Surrey’s tallest building from 2003 until 2017, and the project won the “world’s best overall new development” award at MIPIM 2004 in Cannes.

Walmart and T&T Supermarket anchor the retail floors, Walmart having taken over the space Target Canada vacated when it collapsed in 2015, itself a replacement for an earlier Zellers location. Best Buy occupies ground once held by Future Shop before that chain’s 2015 closure, part of a roughly 140-store mix that includes Winners and Shoppers Drug Mart, and part of a pattern of anchor turnover that mixed-use complexes with institutional co-tenants like SFU tend to absorb more easily than standalone malls.

Blackwood Partners Management Corporation, which bought the mall portion in 2007, now oversees a complex combining 130,000 sqm of retail with SFU’s campus and roughly 1,000,000 sqft of Class A office space, all connected directly to Surrey Central SkyTrain station, a transit-anchored density that has helped the surrounding city core grow busier through the 2010s and 2020s even as standalone regional malls elsewhere lost ground to e-commerce.