Gruen was a European-style socialist; he found individual stores in downtown venues to be inefficient, and the suburban lifestyle of 1950s America too "car-centric" and wanted to design a building that would be a communal gathering place, where people would shop, drink coffee, and socialize, as he remembered from his native Vienna. Southdale Center was loosely modeled on the arcades of several heavily populated European cities and purposely included "eye-level display cases" to "lure customers into stores". Gruen imagined that Southdale would eventually include "a medical center, schools and residences, not just a parade of glitzy stores." In a statement to the Minneapolis Sunday Tribune (now the Star Tribune), Gruen and his economic consultant Lawrence P. Smith described the regional shopping center as a place that could "take care of today's needs and today's living" and would bring the community together by providing "a new outlet for that primary human instinct to mingle with other humans." The neighborhood surrounding the center was specifically built to accompany the mall.