The shopping mall, the delivery system of postwar abundance, was always more than a center for shopping. Malls have been with us for more than a generation, but only now are we beginning to ask: What have they done to us?
As American cities acquired instant communities, suburbanites wanted some urban amenities but in a more congenial, human-scaled and small-town form. Enter the malls. They were a combination of sanitized surrogate city centers
–Reader`s Digest Condensed Books versions of Manhattan, with all the nasty parts taken out–and fantasy main streets, bright and nostalgic, providing surcease within the streamlined dream.
They were fully modern, totally technological palaces, institutionalizing the fantasies and longings–and responding to the fears–of the growing middle class. The mall`s enigmatic blank facade protected a lavish interior world that, with flashing lights and puffs of hype, created the Emerald City at every interchange. The mall was suburbia`s Utopia–Main Street in a spaceship.
Responding to suburbia`s growth in population and economic power, malls got bigger; some became cities unto themselves.
Soon malls were linking up with like-minded environments, threatening to cover the continent with a blanket of interconnected structures and modes of organizing work, shopping and living, all based on the shopping-mall principles of enclosure and control. From New York`s Suffolk to California`s Orange County, the Mallcondo Continuum would consist of a vast empire of enclosure: an unbroken series of centrally managed housing developments, protected enclaves of condominiums and planned communities, containing industrial parks, office complexes and corporate campuses, all connected to the friendly neighborhood amusement park-domed stadium-casino-art center-Hanging-Gardens-of-Babylon-lobby high-rise hotel-museum-aquarium-conventi on center-shopping mall.
If you lived here, you`d be home by now–and maybe you are.
Earlier this year, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce was presented with a study confirming that the Mallcondo Continuum is now dominant, that the urban norm is no longer the central city and its suburbs but the ”suburban downtown.”
But what of the urban downtown? Rudely awakened by the mall`s suburban success, downtowns began to revive themselves. One of their major tools, ironically enough, was the shopping mall. At first snubbing them as suburban nests of tackiness, downtowns in the 1970s saw them differently: as instant salvation.
Now the Mallcondo Continuum even runs through center cities: Manhattan`s Trump Tower (a shopping mall for the rich and famous), Citicorp Center (a village square submerged in the city) and Chicago`s Water Tower Place and Illinois Center. They have their analogues in cities of all sizes in all parts of America.
In recently expanded Sun Belt cities, the mall is the basic building block. The newest urban form is a suburban import.
Besides their impact on the landscape, malls have become an intimate part of life and the life cycle. Almost immediately, teenagers began accomplishing their rites of passage at the mall. Today, those teenagers are parents who may have introduced their babies to their first trees and fountains at the mall, sent their toddlers on their first run across the mall court and now use the mall as a huge comfort-controlled day-care center for their own restless adolescents.
Over the years, we`ve seen the malls perform many positive functions.
Although high on passivity and low on intellectual stimulation, they offer a better theater-of-life for teenagers than many main streets and safer recreation than cruising on highways. They provide the elderly with much-needed alternatives to their often isolated lives.
For everyone, they offer a low-stress oasis of human scale, where the age-old activities of walking and gawking are permissible. Acquaintances are renewed there, and strangers even sometimes talk to each other.
With their stores selling everything from maternity clothes to denture cream, their service workers including justices of the peace, dentists, stockbrokers, divorce lawyers, insurance salespeople and the occasional funeral director, and with every age and activity represented, malls would seem to be the compleat life center of our times. But they leave out a lot, and they impose too much.
The mall is a tightly controlled environment. It has the kind of management control that if given to a city government would make Mussolini look like a wimp. The environment itself not only screens out unpleasantness, it also limits choices and possibilities. Its intense artificiality and its combination of stimulation and sensory deprivation are among the causes of
”mall-aise,” a sense of disquiet, disorientation and even a seasick-like distress (”mal de mall”) some people experience in the mall.
The mall`s acknowledged first loyalty is to its function as a selling machine, and this determines its priorities. The manager of Southdale Mall in Minnesota (the oldest enclosed regional mall in the country) recently justified the closing of its video arcade with tales of a California mall where ”punks with green hair scared female shoppers away.”
This is how malls solve social problems. (Which of course doesn`t always distinguish them from downtowns.) It is also how they foster the manipulative, single-purpose environments they advertise as community centers.
The mall has become a focus for a runaway culture of consumption of biblical proportions. Our product lust may seem more sedate than partying around the Golden Calf–we prefer to shop for designer golden calfskin boots and miniature replicas at the Gold `N Calf shop. But in a nation that produces less than it consumes, that is living on borrowed money and borrowed time, our society may literally shop till we drop.
By becoming consumed by consumption, we`re losing perspective. We`re losing even the idea of having perspective and of assigning true value to other aspects of culture such as justice, compassion, education, vocation and intellectual growth. All of those are elements of a healthy, balanced–and evolving–community.
The mall offers a particular kind of escape from the dangers of reality that can cross the fine line between the innocent and the insidious. Part of what we escape from is complexity and variety.
The steady-state mall formula developed in response to economic and cultural factors. Big corporations selling standardized merchandise in replicated environments were profitable, but the uniformity of malls everywhere and their controlled novelty were also reassuring to a mobile but insecure middle class that liked things to be new and different as long as they were the same everywhere.
So the mall enacted the theme-park theory of heritage and replaced reality with three-dimensional illusion. However cute and apparently harmless, there is something profoundly disquieting about a mall like the Herald Center in Manhattan, which thematically replicates 10 Manhattan neighborhoods inside its protective walls, all of which exist within a few miles of its Herald Square location.
But then, one of the theme floors is Herald Square itself.
You don`t have to think about the homeless when you`re in Herald Center, as you might in Herald Square. It`s the next best thing to being in Westchester.
Today, the mall is undergoing some interesting transformations, mostly due to its confrontation with the city. Some city governments and businesses, and some mall developers, realized that the suburban mall should not simply be imposed on existing city streets and realities: It has to respond to them. Now we are seeing public-private partnership in many cities and metro areas that seek simultaneously to solve social problems and create economic development. This effort`s symbol as well as one of its chief expressions is sometimes the urban shopping mall. In Richmond, Va., the public-private development of the downtown Sixth Street marketplace involved minority entrepreneurs from the very beginning and provided them with the best support systems the city had to offer. These and other efforts suggest that the mall could actually fulfill more of its potential as a true community center.
Some malls have gone further in community involvement than most of us realize. Roosevelt Field in New York, for example, has even sponsored college scholarships. Many malls have community events and facilities, and these might be encouraged and expanded beyond the no-risk charities and the Weight Watchers meeting on alternate Tuesdays in a bare basement room. But malls will also have to loosen up their control fetish and let a little democracy and diversity in.
Similarly, the mall will have to pay closer attention to its internal community, to its retail employees, for example. Anyone whose shopping pleasure has been disrupted by employees complaining loudly to each other knows that the mall is becoming a hotbed of discontent. Since the decline in service has made the cover of Time magazine, malls may have to pay attention. Now that the economy is no longer the same as it was when the mall first flowered, strengthening these community aspects probably will be a key to the mall`s prosperity and certainly to its evolution. Malls would like to join in the latest market-segmentation trends, which threaten to divide us all into income cults, lifestyle tribes and zip-code clans, but they are poorly equipped for that. They`ve been too successful in attracting everyone.
With the old nuclear family exploded into multi-income households and single-parent families, the need for social services will increase.
With the middle class shattered into a service sector and a servant sector–those lower-paid retail and fast-food employees who often work in the mall–there could be trouble ahead if values don`t change.
With computerized shopping by television and telephone and the inevitable contraction of our high-consumption lifestyles, malls will need to compete for market share by stressing services and customer loyalty. Treating the mall itself as a community with different kinds of citizens–the employees, the customers–as well as getting sincerely involved in the outside community, are elegant ways of achieving these ends.
What if the malls actually became the model communities of our era?
Unless they are content to rest in cynicism and decline, these castles of fantasy will have to adjust to new realities. The malls aren`t in Oz anymore.
