When the critical theorist Walter Benjamin tried to embody the cultural condition of Paris in the 1930s, he identified the city’s shopping arcades as a microcosm of urban life. These arcades, he argued, marked the transformation of western society in the mid-19th century from one of production to one of consumption. The iron-framed, glass roofed passages, their displays sparkling at night, separated from the dinginess of the streets, became the dreamscapes of citizens escaping drudgery through the creation of desire.
On a recent visit to a vast shopping mall in the US, I saw a young girl wearing a pink T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “I shop therefore I am.” Arcades, and their brash successors, malls, seem to encourage cultural critiques.
When Benjamin wrote about the Parisian arcades they were past their best. Their sparkle had been dimmed by the grands magasins, which have themselves since faded. But the mall, which in turn killed or swallowed the department store, just keeps going, now more than half a century old.
Britain, with its suburban car culture, was seduced more completely by the mall than continental Europe, where local shops and markets survive and thrive. Perhaps it is partly climate, partly the lack of a cafe culture, but Brits have never felt comfortable hanging out in cities. When they do, they feel the need for a commercial prop: coffee, alcohol, food, drugs. The few youths and protesters who use space simply to congregate are moved on. British public space is reserved for consumption.
So the mall becomes a surrogate square or piazza, and it has been wildly successful. Westfield London, which is being built in White City, will be Europe’s biggest inner-city shopping centre; Brent Cross, the UK’s first mega-mall, is at the heart of a huge urban renovation scheme. The British, like the Americans, seem more comfortable in private space than in public, and the success of the shopping mall proves it. We like the security, the predictability, the corporate familiarity of branded space.
Although we could recall Istanbul’s Ottoman bazaar, or even the Regency Burlington Arcade in London, the history of the mall as we know it begins with the commercial culture and confidence of postwar America. And it can be traced back to one architect, Victor Gruen. The mall, that most suburban of American building types, was in fact inspired by Gruen’s uber-urban home town, Vienna, from which Gruen had fled the Nazis. By the 1950s he was living in the US. As suburban life there prospered, levels of car ownership exploded. Gruen saw that downtowns were incapable of accommodating the predicted increase in traffic as populations sprawled outward and retailers remained in the city centre locations. His proposal was to build ring roads (based on Vienna’s Ringstrasse) and to banish cars from downtown streets. Gruen’s first malls were in effect new downtowns that leavened the commercial with post offices, schools and daycare centres.
Schemes such as Gruen’s took root as retailers followed their customers out to the suburbs. Using big-name stores to anchor a new development and bring businesses in their wake, the pedestrian mall was quickly adapted as a suburban solution.
But by the time Gruen built the Southdale Center in 1956, outside Minneapolis, it had become apparent that a pedestrianised pseudo city centre created problems of its own. The car parks were too far from the stores, and in the harsh heat and cold of the plains the customers had to spend too long out of their climate-controlled, tail-finned cars. Gruen’s solution was to squeeze all the attractions into a two-storey building erected around a large, central court. The architecture became introverted and malls became big, dumb boxes focused inwards on crystalline atriums.
Gruen had envisioned European-style city centres, places of social interaction, as a riposte to the atomisation of suburban life. He was a socialist attempting to build an urban lifestyle. Instead, he created the symbol of US suburban capitalism. The suburban malls sucked life out of city centres, increased reliance on cars and reduced architecture to mere storefronts. Malls became emblems of globalisation – placeless, faceless, universal and dumb. Gruen’s idealistic Southdale Center now competes with Minnesota’s Mall of America, which pulls in 45m visitors a year – more than Disneyland, Graceland and the Grand Canyon combined.
Ignored by the big-name architects and studied only as sites of the anthropology of the ordinary, malls languished in design no-man’s land. Yet they survived. Even as downtowns gentrified through coffee and lofts, they flourished. Paradoxically, the mall is seen as the answer to urban decline. As planning restrictions in the 1990s sought to curb the explosion of out-of-town shopping and its deleterious effects on town centres, the mall triumphed in the city. Manchester’s Arndale became a symbol of rebirth after the 1996 IRA bomb (forgetting that the original 1970s mall had flattened a fascinating swathe of Victorian city centre); Birmingham’s Bull Ring signified its slow recovery from being the worst urban intervention in British history.
Today’s situation is less that of malls competing with cities but of cities becoming malls. Pedestrianisation, faux heritage, the big-brand behemoths and their over-familiar fascias, constant surveillance and CCTV, the blurring of boundaries between public and private space – these are leitmotifs of the mall, not the city centre.
Increasingly the difference between the two is being obscured. Big developments routinely win planning permission on condition that they provide generous outdoor space for the public. But this is not to be confused with public space. These are squares and streets that remain resolutely private, guarded and cleaned by private contractors. You could argue, so what? But private space tends to preclude the esoteric: landlords like corporate clients that commit to long leases and attract other branded chains. This is not the way to Mediterranean-style piazzas but to outdoor malls.
It is not just our city streets that are succumbing to “mallification”. Airports have long been sustained more by shopping than by flying, and our train stations have gone the same way. Even the Great Court of the British Museum, with its undulating glazed roof, shops and echoey cafe, begins to look like a mall. Surely this means architects will concentrate on the mall, in the way that offices are becoming more dramatic to attract the wealthiest clients?
Just look at the US. In Los Angeles, architect Jon Jerde has created a series of staggering and complex mall developments. In Las Vegas, he has created Fremont Street Experience, a new downtown built in an old downtown in a city that never really had a downtown. The irony is that through the mantra of “placemaking”, of heavily themed event and destination spaces, the thing that is lost is any sense of place. Air-conditioning, international brands, escalators, global food courts, standardised architectural finishes strip the visitor of any sense of loci. The mall is the ultimate non-place.
Benjamin described the Parisian arcades as buildings from a dream, all scintillating light but with no real exterior. Malls do have outsides. And that is part of the problem. They are cheaply constructed, strictly one-use-only. When they fade or go out of fashion they must be replaced – there is no capacity for change. These are not real buildings, but stage sets.
Mall architects created what became known as the “Gruen effect”, a deliberate plan to disorient people so that they would pass shops they would otherwise have missed. Gruen retired to his home town, disillusioned with his own legacy. He later said, “I never really left Vienna.” Unlike the girl in the pink T-shirt, who knew exactly where she was. She was shopping.
Edwin Heathcote is the FT’s architecture critic
