Ethnography

Katie Tyo

Professor Klepper

English 114B

March 23, 2012

Ethnography

The space I chose for my ethnography was of a shopping center in the Santa Clarita Valley. This center is known to the locals as the Kmart Center. The Kmart Center is a center that could be improved upon. There is a way for this center to work better for the whole community.

This center has one of the largest parking lots in the Santa Clarita Valley. The parking lot never even gets close to filling one fourth of it let alone the whole parking lot, not even during the holiday season. This humongous parking lot could be put to better use. There are many different ways that this parking lot could be altered to make it work more efficiently.

The Kmart Center only has shops around the edges of the center itself. There is one edge of the center that does not have any shops along the side of it. Some of the space in the middle of the center could be used for the addition of another building. There are many different places that there could be more buildings added to make this center benefit the community more. The addition of more buildings to this center could create more jobs for people of the Santa Clarita Valley.

            If I could change this center to benefit the whole community I would add a building or two along the one edge that is completely empty. This would still leave a rather large parking lot for consumers to use but it would use some of the wasted space. All while helping the community with providing more services as well as more jobs for local residents. This would affect the local community in many ways that are necessary for the local residents to be able to live comfortably.

 The Kmart Center is one of the largest centers in the Santa Clarita Valley. It is also one of the centers with the fewest number of stores in it. There are many ways that it could be improved upon but these are the ways that I have chosen to improve it.