Honestly, in my childhood opinion, it was fine, just trying out food and drinks (whether from shopping or restaurants), testing electronics and arcade games, maybe even buying some toys or going to indoor play areas.
Though the novelty of it soon worn out gradually, taking a walk and peek at around these areas for anything interesting is good once in a while, even if you're not buying anything.
Edit: on sec thoughts, should I place this in the urbanism community? And just so you know, I'm not an American, so I wouldn't know what butcherism might occur in the implementation of malls.
Malls are bad mostly because they’re an extension of suburban car culture. If they put a few stories of housing on top of every mall, turned the parking lots into greenspace, and gave each one a train station, they’d be alright.
Malls aren’t terrible in and of themselves, but they highlight a lack of things like public spaces, public amenities, public transit, etc. There’s nothing wrong with concentrated areas of development where people can access goods and services, but if they’re privately-owned and controlled and exist only to generate rents for landlords, they’re going to suck.
If you had, like, a mall in the middle of a bunch of neighborhoods with bus lines leading to it, it would be a really rational way to do a big shopping center that's protected from the elements and has public spaces for people to use. Some malls do this to various degrees, but most of them in my experience are just kind of plopped on the side of the highway and going to them is a big chore and it's no wonder that they're all dying out in the face of online shopping.
There's a mall near where I used to live that was just plopped down on an empty field next to a highway but the city had foresight to build a rail connection and bus terminal there too. It's now been there about 15 years and now it's surrounded by housing.
I can't really be mad at that kind to thing tbh.
I support their proliferation because they centralize commodity distribution
Every mall is a potential future distribution and community center
I can understand critical support for such places, but this feels a bit uncritical, if not rosy tinted. But, hey, who am I to say this?
It's not really a matter of support, critical or otherwise, they're a utility plain and simple, they can be badly designed or well-designed, well-placed or plopped in the middle of a highway, but the fact is they simplify logistics and concentrate scaled social interaction like any central marketplace throughout history
Under capitalism, the concept is usually wasted by the fact they're used as heavily policed modern-day bazaars for trendy consumption products, under socialism the function and utility can expand from the limited horizon of privatized accumulation
The space provides numerous advantages for social development, just have to kick out the capitalists who control the venues
Sorry, I was kinda caught off guard by the others' critical response, so I just said that, in awareness of that, but I agree that it's good to remember that malls won't necessarily stay that way, from a change of capitalist base and thus superstructure to socialist ones.
Lmao, of course anyone would do so, especially in the Global South.
Yeah, they were fun. We couldn't go anywhere else that wasn't somebody's house with their parents around.
But places shouldn't have been planned in such a way that the only way we could hang out somewhere like that was by driving ourselves there.
"But places shouldn't have been planned in such a way that the only way we could hang out somewhere like that was by driving ourselves there."
Yeah, one of my main gripes, I would say.
I'm not a huge fan because once you get off the bus you've got to cross a big parking lot. Imo mainstreets are better because you can bus or bike right up to them, and they're just more charming. Less glossy white and high ceilings, y'know?
Malls are fun and I like them because you can hang out as long as you want with zero expectation of buying anything. Fewer and fewer places like that.
My kids love them too they get to walk and see people and new stores and things.
Biggest downside as others have noted is that you need a car to access them and they're privately owned, so many of them are getting shittier (e.g. taking out water fountains)
I think the only reason that there isn't an expectation of buying something in a mall is purely because there are so many people walking around with the intention of buying something and so much turnover that it's really difficult to police. If they could, they totally would. :(
I agree with you.
I think there's still a limit, as expressed by the fact that malls still devote significant space towards folks sitting or kids playing, for free. Even new malls I've seen continue to have ample communal space. This space is justified as a perk for the purpose keeping the families etc. at the mall longer and spending more, but the result is that there's a significant underlying infrastructure that allows for individuals to exist pretty comfortably and without feeling pushed to spend money. Its still nowhere near public land.
Compare to something like a casino where almost all communal space has been sectioned off and parking usually costs money. Sitting anywhere in a casino for too long not spending money feels uncomfortable. A "perk" of most casinos (free alcohol) is only accessible if you're spending money. In comparison, malls don't have door fees and tend to have free parking.
I like them for the people watching. For some reason, a lot of mall goers tend to dress in some sort of stereotyped uniforms. The goths are all extra goth, the old ladies all wear that same shade of lavender, the teens all rock the current trends in the most obnoxious ways, the wine moms all have the same sort of floral sundress on. You go into any given GameStop and you see the same basic cast of nerds. It's fun to see so many different types of people so clearly defined by their attire
And to be clear, it's not mean-spirited. I'm not doing it to laugh at them or anything. I just think it's interesting to see the ways that people project their identities, and because in the US that mostly happens through consumer behavior, the mall is the perfect observation site.
Forgive me for my redditor brainworms, but I still enjoy the small comforts of it, and converting them into mixed-used spaces, fine, but housing, Idk about that.
Exton Mall in Exton, Pennsylvania added a number of apartment buildings on the premises, a couple hundred feet from a Whole Foods. A pretty decent chunk of that mall is turned into medical facilities now, it's a pretty weird property and like many virtually inaccessible outside of an automobile.
My hot take is that as a society with climate change the most humane transition would be to make malls into massive mixed use complexes and attach them to all the warehouses, hospitals and mass indoor spaces with freight/passenger rail to make an efficient and climate controlled society while removing human habitation from the vast majority of spaces outside of the One Big Mall
They all use luxury clothing stores as their "anchors" and it blew up in their faces. You don't get regular traffic with luxury goods unless you're in a boom economy, and... you know neoliberals, they assume economic booms will last forever and will debase themselves in any way possible to preserve that.
A shopping mall is only going to work if it strikes that balance between offering goods which everyone can afford with... not just being a supermarket with discrete rooms.
Malls are cool as an accompaniment to cities, but not as a replacement for them. Also, malls are great socialist distribution centers as someone else pointed out. No reason why malls shouldn't get all of their freight delivered by train either.
There's also something concerning about the privatization of public space and consumerism within, and the hyper-capitalism of it all, but I don't think that's the mall's sole appeal. I think there is very much a future for socialist malls as a kind of arcology more resilient to climate change. Malls with good public transit to them (see: many canadian cities
) are a good start....I also just really like indoor plants
Malls are a bandage on the problem of lack of public spaces. The way they're done in America are hideous wastes of space and exemplify every problem with car culture.
The outdoor malls I've seen in Japan and China are cool. I mean most of it is just mindless consumerism, but it can be fun depending on what you're doing. Nearly every train station I've been in those places will have concourse areas that are like malls, and those can be cool. That's fine. Sometimes I like getting an LED Gengar keychain.
I think a better way would be more dense urban planning where little trinkets and food or whatever can be distributed better, with train stations, bus routes, greenery, etc. A big box building surrounded by an ocean of parking lot is horrible.
Open air malls are just markets I'd feel. I've been, sort of by necessity, to loads of very pedestrian reachable malls in europe and they all still suck fucking ass because it puts consumerism front and center and only that. It feels like a casino except you can't play anything.
As I recall they were a soviet invention. The idea was to have a big public space with all the things you need and nice things to see and do. I don't think they ever really got a chance to be tried over there though.
There is a medium mall near me that is kinda falling appart. The city rented a corner store and turned it into a library annex with some city services. Which is pretty close to the original ideaI think. That is actually kinda chill. With the relaxed pressure of capitlaism we can have a nice thing.
https://jacobin.com/2014/04/the-last-shopping-mall
US/Austria:
His plans were for large state-owned indoor agoras that would literally contain the market forces that were running rampant outside their walls. It was a modernist vision for the refounding of American public life. Many of the malls built by Gruen and his company in the 1950s retained elements of this promise, with his Southdale Mall in Edina, Minn., planned around an enormous common meeting place modeled on a European piazza.
By the 1960s, Gruen was horrified by his creations. The shopping mall, along with the freeway and the cheap federally backed mortgage, had become part of the architecture of suburban white supremacy. Gruen returned to Austria in 1968 and furiously worked on a project to pedestrianize Vienna.
Two years before his death in 1980, he stated, “I am often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.”
UK:
In Britain, the progressive pre-history of the shopping mall has an even longer and stranger history. When the anarchist planner Ebenezer Howard outlined his utopian vision for British “garden cities” in 1898, he looked to create in each settlement a “crystal palace” which would combine the functions of London shopping arcades and indoor winter pleasure gardens entirely under one roof. While the structure would be financed and built by the local municipal authority, individual traders would be allowed to practice freely, though their number would be “limited by the principle of public opinion.”
It took the intervention of the Luftwaffe for something like this vision to be realized in Britain. Coventry, a small city in the Midlands of England, is an unlikely site for what might arguably be the first shopping mall-like structure in the world. The total destruction of the city during the war wiped out the dense, packed medieval shopping streets that had characterized its pre–World War II history. With the help of the British government, the city’s head architect Donald Gibson was able to use new emergency legislation to effectively nationalize the center of Coventry, bringing almost 500 acres of land under the total power of the local authority.
There, he built a holistically planned, partly enclosed multi-story shopping center — arguably the first of its kind in the world. While the city owned the land, provided the frame, the concrete steps, the bridges, the car parks, and the greenery, the tenants provided the temperature control, the music, and the lighting. The doors were never locked.
Though the GUM in the SU did in my eyes resemble shopping malls a while before, too:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUM_(department_store)
Ahh, so I was pretty much completely wrong. I had remembered some of the vibe at least.
You have been close and in terms of the GUM they are seen by some as precursors to shopping malls. I mean Corbussier's living machine does incorporate elements of them and is in fact very close to socialist ideas in architecture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit%C3%A9_d%27habitation
Corbussier tried to incorporate living, but also social and communal functions as well as shops in a single building, the vibe is linked to brutalism and the concepts of taking those functions and qualities and thinking in terms of living spaces that have a central point for communal and commercial live was real existing socialist inspired or did influence those in the future i.e. the GDR and later soviet living quarters.
critical support for Lecorbusier for wanting to bulldoze Paris completely and build a huge airplaine runway in the downtown
i saw them a lot on american tv growing up and they seemed really cool/fancy/culturally important but having experienced them in real life now i don't understand why. they're pretty fucking mid.
I had no idea until I saw Mallrats that people would go to the mall and not buy anything. A completely alien idea.
Honestly, I'm not an American, and I'm not used to the usual American malls I see in the news, but from my experience, malls are fine, without any much expectations, I would say.
They're nice so long as the literal gatekeeping is minimal.
I don't get exactly what you mean (I haven't seen much hired guards behind the gatekeeping perse, let alone anyone like a business owner telling someone to exit out the mall just yet).
Usually about paid parking and minimwl public transport to the malls, and the like
I think malls are cool and should be reimagined as potential public or civic centers rather commercial marketplaces. I think the idea of the mall is pretty rad outside the stupid size of their parking lots. Having a place with a ton of stuff in it and people from a city can see each other seems like a fundamentally good idea for getting people to see each other
Best malls I've been to had direct connections to the metro so they had no parking lots.
I was hearing about that on a Mall video essay a couple of days ago. My main mall in my hometown was near the burbs, it was like 80% parking 20% Mall. I saw some of the urban malls in the video and they seemed pretty slick and well planned
Same here, lived in a small town and the nearest mall was 80% parking lot. What's worse is it had 2 sections, divided by the highway. Each section had a separate parking lot. If you wanted to go to the separate section you'd have to go look for your car, drive out and park in the other side, then go do your business there. Absolutely horrible stuff.
In comparison some of the malls I've been to in Toronto or Pittsburgh were much better because they were connected to transport directly or you could just walk to them from the nearest stations/underground parking spaces (still not ideal but beats the sprawling parking lots).
