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Full Version: The Death of the American Mall
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“Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.”
― J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
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"Currently, the US contains around 1,500 of the expansive “malls” of suburban consumer lore. Most share a handful of bland features. Brick exoskeletons usually contain two stories of inward-facing stores separated by tile walkways. Food courts serve mediocre pizza. Parking lots are big enough to easily misplace a car. And to anchor them economically, malls typically depend on department stores: huge vendors offering a variety of products across interconnected sections.

For mid-century Americans, these gleaming marketplaces provided an almost utopian alternative to the urban commercial district, an artificial downtown with less crime and fewer vermin. As Joan Didion wrote in 1979, malls became “cities in which no one lives but everyone consumes”. Peppered throughout disconnected suburbs, they were a place to see and be seen, something shoppers have craved since the days of the Greek agora. And they quickly matured into a self-contained ecosystem, with their own species – mall rats, mall cops, mall walkers – and an annual feeding frenzy known as Black Friday.

“Local governments had never dealt with this sort of development and were basically bamboozled [by developers],” Underhill says of the mall planning process. “In contrast to Europe, where shopping malls are much more a product of public-private negotiation and funding, here in the US most were built under what I call ‘cowboy conditions’.”

Shopping centres in Europe might contain grocery stores or childcare centres, while those in Japan are often built around mass transit. But the suburban American variety is hard to get to and sells “apparel and gifts and damn little else”, Underhill says.

Nearly 700 shopping centres are “super-regional” megamalls, retail leviathans usually of at least 1 million square feet and upward of 80 stores. Megamalls typically outperform their 800 slightly smaller, “regional” counterparts, though size and financial health don’t overlap entirely. It’s clearer, however, that luxury malls in affluent areas are increasingly forcing the others to fight for scraps. Strip malls – up to a few dozen tenants conveniently lined along a major traffic artery – are retail’s bottom feeders and so well-suited to the new environment. But midmarket shopping centres have begun dying off alongside the middle class that once supported them. Regional malls have suffered at least three straight years of declining profit per square foot, according to the International Council of Shopping Centres (ICSC)...."===https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2014/...pping-mall
Any store shopping in person to eventually become an archaic practice, as drones even deliver one's ordered groceries. Only the still unbridled population growth and its congestion preventing a scenario like thinly populated Solarian society and its robot workers, in Asimov's "The Naked Sun". Paranoid recluses avoiding physical contact with each other, communicating by holographic telepresence.
My life in the 80's would include cheesy musical montages of me wandering thru endless sleek and garish malls looking for just the right Christmas gifts to give to my relatives. It was the place to go back in those days---a sort of underground city of useless but pretty trinkets to impress my loved ones with. The mall became the "in" place to go, wandering among so many other consumerist zombies bedazzled by the hypnotic displays of gleaming mass produced commodities. And then there was always the movie theater where one could waste another 2 hours on a Saturday afternoon pretending to be somewhere where we're not. I loved and now miss the 80's---but further thought only turns up a desolate wasteland of meaningless pursuits and socially-cued rituals. Thus the mall as the metaphor and symbol for that sort of superficial and thoughtless floating along that turned me into an anonymous noone among the masses. Extravagant cathedrals of consumerist loyality and piety. And let's not forget the food courts, where one can choose between pizza, chinese, burgers, and burritos to suit one's current tourist mood.