well, malls are indeed a substitute for public space. the entire idea behind them is to recreate the experience of living downtown but contained within the suburban sprawl. i don't blame you one bit if you view them the way they're intended to be experienced as. i suppose there would be little to no malls under socialism or whatever because there would be more emphasis placed in public spaces, thus making malls kinda redundant.
i always thought that malls came about much later than white flight but looking at malls within suburbia as like an extension of/related to white flight is really interesting and makes a lot of sense
I've been reading about it and Victor Gruen, the man credited with coming up with the idea of the mall, never made the intent to segregate explicit to my knowledge. But developers and city planners who embraced the idea of the mall sure did.
Victor Gruen also died bitter about how developers had sullied the idea and "would refuse to pay allimony for those bastard developments". I dunno, the man had to know that the developers and the powerful clients who had commissioned him intended their futuristic projects to have carefully vetted tenants inhabiting them. For a man who supposedly hated cars, he sure added shitton of parking space to his architectural designs, and for a man who wanted to recreate the viennese town centre in the middle of minnesota, he sure made some fuck awful concrete boxes. He's just filled with contrasts, I guess.
well, malls are indeed a substitute for public space. the entire idea behind them is to recreate the experience of living downtown but contained within the suburban sprawl. i don't blame you one bit if you view them the way they're intended to be experienced as. i suppose there would be little to no malls under socialism or whatever because there would be more emphasis placed in public spaces, thus making malls kinda redundant.
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i always thought that malls came about much later than white flight but looking at malls within suburbia as like an extension of/related to white flight is really interesting and makes a lot of sense
I've been reading about it and Victor Gruen, the man credited with coming up with the idea of the mall, never made the intent to segregate explicit to my knowledge. But developers and city planners who embraced the idea of the mall sure did.
Victor Gruen also died bitter about how developers had sullied the idea and "would refuse to pay allimony for those bastard developments". I dunno, the man had to know that the developers and the powerful clients who had commissioned him intended their futuristic projects to have carefully vetted tenants inhabiting them. For a man who supposedly hated cars, he sure added shitton of parking space to his architectural designs, and for a man who wanted to recreate the viennese town centre in the middle of minnesota, he sure made some fuck awful concrete boxes. He's just filled with contrasts, I guess.