GLOBAL REACH: St. Pete’s JoEllen Schilke. Credit: Marina Williams

I had an epiphany the other day at the mall.

My partner and I were sitting by a window at The Grape, the wine-tasting emporium in International Plaza's Bay Street, sipping reds and whites and watching shoppers haggle with the guy at the jewelry cart, and it occurred to me: This whole scene — people spilling onto the sidewalks and lounging at outdoor cafes — was weirdly reminiscent of a plaza in a European city. I'd always wondered what right the mall had to call itself "International," and here, sort of, was a reason.

The mall is not, of course, in the same league as its urban counterparts. It's a Disneyfied replica thereof, its charms manufactured, not organic. And you can't just walk to this town square from your townhouse — you have to drive there, search for a parking space in a huge soulless expanse of blacktop, then hike many blocks past car after car to the buzzing hub in the distance.

Yet many, many people do just that: the drive, the search for parking, the hike. And they're going for the same reason that Romans flock to the Piazza Navona or Parisians stroll the Marais — they want to shop and see and be seen in a walkable, open space. They long for a sense of community, so much so that even a synthetic community will do.

When we first started planning this year's Urban Explorers Handbook — Creative Loafing's annual alternative guide to notable neighborhoods — we'd thought it would be appropriate to treat the malls of Westshore and International Plaza as a neighborhood (Mallsville, we called it) because that is where so many people in this region flock for a sense of community. But we finally decided that, without the residential component, there's really no "there" there.

But it would be wrong to dismiss the appeal of malls. However artificial they might be, the driving force behind the creation of these environments (OK, besides money) is that they respond to a real human need. If we don't have real strollable urban neighborhoods, enter the developers to create fake ones.

Granted, it's the big-box developers themselves who played a big role in destroying the Main Streets they replaced. And it's true in Florida that we are in danger of having all the idiosyncrasies of our mercantile and community lives sucked up and smoothed away by developers' profit motives.

But it doesn't have to be that way. In fact, in many neighborhoods across Tampa Bay, it isn't that way. Those are the places we celebrate in the UrbEx Handbook, this year and in past years: We're providing overviews — for residents, newcomers and passers-through alike — of neighborhoods where the real thing is happening.

In some cases, it's a story of struggle. Since our 2005 UrbEx Handbook, we've seen two community beacons go out of business in Seminole Heights — Covivant Gallery and Viva La Frida — and the neighborhood still lacks a strong retail component. But the area's vitality and variety have not faded, and with new energy percolating in other Heights neighborhoods, the future still looks promising.

The real estate slowdown inevitably affected another 'hood that looked to be up-and-coming in 2005: downtown Tampa. Back then, most of the Channelside District was still on the drawing board, and our then-art critic Mary Mulhern — now a City Council member — predicted that "the new urban fabric" of the district would be "woven of synthetic, with a few strands of vintage cotton and silk interspersed." She's proven right for the most part, and maybe it's just as well that the bear market saved us from megaliths like the O2 twin towers (not to be confused with the troubled Towers of Channelside, which did get built, for better or worse). But the vision of developers like Ken Stoltenberg, who's making room for Stageworks' new theater in his Grand Central condo, bodes well for those strands of cotton and silk.

And then of course there's downtown St. Pete and SoHo/Hyde Park. Back in 2005, we didn't even include these 'hoods in the Handbook, because we wanted to highlight areas that weren't as well-known. But this year, we decided their success could not be ignored — these are destination neighborhoods, and any picture of what's working in Tampa Bay would have to include both these districts. Another difference this year is that we've added selective listings to the Handbook, naming the top 20 or 30 attractions in each district — or in the case of bar-hopping meccas Dunedin and the University Area, the top 21. In the case of SoHo and downtown St. Pete, the limitation was well nigh impossible, but necessary: We could have created lists of attractions for them that would have gone on for pages.

And when it came to choosing a cover photo, it was a St. Pete denizen whose ebullience and relaxed Florida vibe summed up what we wanted to celebrate. An entrepreneur who's experienced firsthand the changes that have taken place in St. Pete, JoEllen Schilke has managed to create a real-world oasis, the Globe Coffee Lounge, that embodies everything that makes a city work: diversity, openness, a passion for the arts and music and food, and a willingness to persevere through the good and the bad.

Try to get all that at the mall.