Welcome to the 23nd issue of Place! The mall has become a modern symbol of consumerism, both shamed and exalted, but there’s no denying that it has become a staple modern “third place” : neither home nor work, but a place where we plug into a community. It’s a place going through an identity crisis, as any physical experience is at the moment, and editor Karis Hustad considers whether this also means a reckoning for the way we dream, American or otherwise.
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Stripped
There was a strip mall by my friend’s house in suburban St. Paul where we used to go hang out on rainy cold Saturday mornings after a weekend sleepover. We’d pick up a cheap caramel coffee drink from the vending machines at Super America (a gas station) and wander along the businesses at Hamline Center on our way back to her house. We’d hang out in the empty laundromat, which had an enveloping scent of detergent, sitting on washing machines eating donuts, or have an early lunch at China Restaurant, the aptly named Chinese restaurant to which I later gave a glowing review in my high school newspaper. We discovered that the strip mall actually had a small indoor section, with terra-cotta tiled floors, wood benches and a circular planter built below a skylight that let in a bit of dull light from the gray winter mornings.
It was the definition of mundane, but at age 14 it felt like a taste of freedom. It was a place that wasn’t home and wasn’t school, without the gaze of adults or our peers, where we could just be. Interacting with the aesthetic of adulthood without the trappings of its responsibility.
Strip malls are a staple of most Americans’ commercial life. Most look something like the nondescript Hamline Center: long one-story buildings constructed of neat brick, the lining of a square primarily filled with a parking lot for cars to wait while a driver runs their errands at a variety of unrelated businesses. These structures are a mirror of the car-centric development of American consumerism. They began as open air markets where butchers and grocers would display their wares to drive-by customers, the lots expanding to match the increase in car ownership and infrastructure across the country. Eventually sidewalk hawking went away, replaced with neon signs that could catch a driver’s eye while going 60 mph on a nearby freeway. The idea of clustering businesses made economic sense, and these outdoor shopping centers paved the path to the first indoor malls which became an icon of American life (the first actually being Minnesota’s Southdale Center, modeled after the arcades of the architect’s native Vienna, but also because it is too cold for most of the year to spend time outdoors).
Malls are also among what urban planners have dubbed “third places.” The places where we go that aren’t home (the first place) and aren’t work (the second place), but are physical place we go for our formation of self and community. For those growing up in the suburban sprawl, it was among the first places we could go without parental supervision and the first place we could spend our minimum-wage earning dollars on sales rack finds, make aspirational purchases for those people we thought we could be (but only with the right t-shirt). And this isn’t unique to the Midwest. People escape the traffic jams of Jakarta for the calm escalators and atriums of the myriad malls that have cropped up in recent years. Dubai’s dozens of mega-malls provide climate-controlled public squares in a city where temperatures soar over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for much of the year. In some cases, the place of the mall has become even more profound: The 2015 reopening of Westgate Mall in Nairobi after a tragic 2013 terrorist attack was a symbol of resilience for many. “They have not broken our spirit and what I saw at the mall on Sunday is an indication that we shall overcome,” wrote freelance journalist Njonjo Kihuria at the time.
And while “retail therapy” has become a cliche, there’s evidence that certain purchases can inspire a mood boost and optimism. There’s a certain visualization that accompanies physical objects, imagining how they will shape the lives we will live once we’ve made the purchase. When there’s a downturn, economists have observed a “lipstick effect” in which there’s an uptick in small indulgences because larger purchases are out of reach. Malls are masters of assuaging these anxieties and stoking aspiration, even when they aren’t trying. Sitting in the laundromat at Hamline Center, I imagined myself throwing in a load of laundry downstairs from my one-bedroom apartment in Manhattan after a long day at my job as a magazine editor (forgive me, it was 2005). It didn’t matter whether it would come true; I could envision what was ahead and who I could be. Under capitalism, this is how we dream.
And yet, the mall - strip or otherwise - seems to be a victim of its own success. There were over 1,100 malls in the US by 2008. The boom squarely hit bust during the Great Recession when consumers pulled back on spending coupled with the shift to online shopping. The mall-groomed casual consumerism perfectly transitioned to the Internet — which has become third place in itself for Millennials and Gen Z — and super fast delivery made a drive to the mall seem extraneous. Today there’s a number of zombie malls across the US, quiet and filled with generic mom-and-pop shops. (And some have died altogether, ironically gaining more attention through urbex photographers exploring their shattered hulls.)
Perhaps the mall as a third place was doomed from the beginning - when you privatize a gathering place, it inevitably will be dictated by the demands of the market and not the needs of the community that utilizes it. Sometimes those go hand-in-hand, but in times of crisis, particularly as we’re seeing today, the two parties dovetail quite dramatically. Cafes, restaurants, hairdressers, even places of worship are also struggling with how to stay open without foot traffic. Even with new ideas in experiential marketing and upscale food halls to entice people to return to malls, an airborne virus is accelerating shifts in consumer habits that could be difficult to break. Our economies are dependent on these places surviving, but I also wonder if our ability to imagine what comes next does too. It’s been more and more difficult to envision what the future holds, without some sort of aspirational infrastructure to prop up a dream, however out-of-touch it might be. A reset is needed — resources and economic opportunity must be distributed more evenly, and I believe that requires a commitment to that which is tangible.
Some may say good riddance to a structure designed to get one to spend money, but I find it far more insidious that with online shopping our data is being sucked into an algorithm for the profit of a handful of companies. When I shop online, I don’t get the endorphins from the walk from the car to the store, the tactile pleasure of touching fabrics, the rush seeing my crush at an adjacent elevator, the relaxed stroll of window shopping, where I visualize a three-dimensional life, rather than one that feels primed for a static photo, boxed in on a grid. Instead I feel alone in a dark room, with a million silent blinking eyes monitoring each move, invisible hands silently and endlessly adjusting to ease me into an ever-more frictionless purchase. What happens to our aspirations when they are shrunk down to the size of a smartphone screen, hosted in the new online public square owned by the very few, which rewards the most obnoxious voices and keeps us in our bubbles instead of bumping into someone new?
I think back to Hamline Center, and wonder what it had been like to architect a place like this, imagine the people walking along the covered sidewalk to the dentist’s office or taking a seat inside the atrium while waiting for an optician’s appointment. I imagine part of the payoff is knowing that you’re creating the infrastructure for people’s daily lives and dreams. It is mundane, in one sense, but strikes me as hopeful. I hope, even if we are set for a winter of further withdrawal, there is still some truth to the old saying, if you build it, they will come.
-Karis Hustad is journalist based in London, usually covering debt, and co-editor of Place.
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Why cities should be edible.
Join us next week as we hang art on the walls in Tel Aviv.