Malls are the New Whales

Originally posted in July 2014

I recently finished reading the book Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space — a collection of essays by several different scholars edited by Michael Sorkin. The overarching theme of the book involves the deliberate shifting of the public’s understanding of “the commons” as a place to mingle, meet and interact away from public space to privatized space. Although a bit dated (the book was published in 1992), it is still a relevant and insightful (if occasionally a bit indulgent and wanky) collection of socioeconomic commentary.

The creation of massive shopping malls like the Mall of America and the West Edmonton Mall as artifices which attempt to supplant the function and replicate the very heart of the city. After all, when a mall offers shops, restaurants, theaters, hotels and even an amusement park, all expertly decorated, climate controlled and insulated from the “problems” of the real city (crime, poor people, etc), who even needs the real city anymore?

I was surprised when just a couple of days later I found this article: A Haunting Look Inside Some of America’s Abandoned Shopping Malls. The article features the photography of Seph Lawless who decided to revisit and capture two formerly bustling shopping malls near Akron, Ohio which he frequented as a child, but which both closed during the recession of the last decade.

The article ends with a quote from Lawless:

People forget that a mall was not just a place to shop. It was a community center. We’d go there to visit friends. We’d spent a lot of time there…I think people will miss those experiences, those memories they shared.

It’s a sweet sentiment, sure. But what was so striking is this quote effectively validates everything which the writers of Variations said was going to happen. Peoples’ understanding of the shopping mall and of public space were absolutely conflated — to the point that the two were synonymous for people of my generation.

If you grew up in the suburbs within the last thirty years, the mall was the place to be — the only place to be. There were no public plazas or any places to gather and hang out. Maybe the odd public park (assuming your neighborhood even had any public parks left — public meaning not privately owned by a developer, home owner’s association, etc), but the mall was the alpha and omega of social interaction.

Another thing I found striking was this passage:

Years later, both malls were now abandoned and slated for demolition, reflecting the decline of malls all across the country. According to CBS, no new indoor mall has been built in America since 2006 and at least one expert predicts that half of all existing malls will close within the next 10 years. Lawless saw this trend as a symbol of economic decline during the Great Recession, and decided to photograph both malls before they disappeared.

It blows my mind to think that not even one new mall has been built anywhere in the US in eight years, and that experts are now proposing the imminent decline of the shopping mall.

The irony of malls — decades ago pegged as the covert, paradigm-shifting, inequality driving destroyer of public space and urban democracy — now as something which must be documented before they slip quietly into extinction is strange.

So that begs the question — if malls were designed to supplant and privatize the public space, and malls are now themselves staged to be a thing of the past — what will supplant the mall? What will serve as the artifice of the artifice?