Over at The Bulwark recently, I wrote a review/broader piece bouncing off architecture critic Alexandra Lange’s history of the mall, Meet Me By the Fountain.

It’s an excellent book, and Lange writes up front that it’s much more than an urbanist critique of the mall (though it is to some extent) or a eulogy for the mall, or sensationalized account of the “dead mall.” It is, rather, a serious treatment of the mall as a social and architectural phenomenon, and as a fixture of American life. And plus, she thinks that the narrative of dying malls is a simplification.

So one thing I found very interesting was this:

Victor Gruen, traveling around the postwar United States and chewing on ideas in planning and retail that were being tried out all over the rapidly suburbanizing country, conceived of the mall. His malls—the first of which was built on an open-air plan—were meant to be gathering spaces, not just commercial spaces. They were not, or at least not only, “temples of consumerism”; they were actually envisioned as more civic alternatives to the untidy suburban commercial strips that by the 1950s were already showing their age. His first enclosed mall—also the nation’s first—was envisioned as a full-fledged mixed-use development, but only the commercial portion was built.

The mall was intended from the outset to leaven the suburbs with a hint of the urbanity that most of its residents both fled and missed. Even the mall’s department store anchors were directly descended from the old urban department stores that anchored commercial districts. In other words, the mall developed its reputation for being a purely commercial space as its founding civic promise became increasingly attenuated. And in some ways, the replacement of ailing malls with mixed-use “town centers” is not really a new development but a substantive return to the original idea of the mall. “If downtown could not be made to hitch up to the mall,” Lange summarizes the views of the first mall builders, “the mall would become downtown.” And so, in a way, it did.

The Urban Land Institute defines “town center,” in part, as “an enduring, walkable, and integrated open-air, multiuse development that is organized around a clearly identifiable and energized public realm where citizens can gather and strengthen their community bonds. It is anchored by retail, dining, and leisure uses.” That “public realm” language notwithstanding, these developments are master-planned and generally privately owned and managed. They are the successor to but also the fulfillment of Gruen’s original idea of the mall.

In other words: the phenomenon of town centers replacing defunct malls is actually closer to this: the thing we call a “mall” is a betrayal of the original concept, and the thing replacing it is much closer to that original conception.

Better late than never? Maybe. Or maybe the effective privatization of the city isn’t a great idea.

Now my editor actually asked me to elaborate on what a “town center” is, because he didn’t really know what I was talking about. If you’re reading this newsletter you probably do, but I’ll elaborate here too. Basically, these are private developments that mimic downtowns or small commercial districts, with mixed uses (retail/restaurants, offices, and apartments) and pedestrian-friendly streets. And lots of parking garages. They blur the line between “actual commercial district” and “outdoor mall with other uses appended on.” And, as Lange notes, your constitutional rights probably don’t apply here.

What Lange does very well in this book is dig into and present America’s preference for a sort of quasi-urbanism. Americans like the good parts of cities—proximity, walkability, energy, culture—but they don’t like the downsides, which they often perceive as being “bundled with” the positives. The mall was a top-down, commercial-first attempt to unbundle those things: to impose safety, order, and cleanliness but retain the rest. This involved no small measure of racism, and, as the bit I quoted from my review above explains, it didn’t quite work. But nonetheless, there is an echo of urbanism in the mall. I find that really interesting. It seems like a starting point for making the case for enlivening the suburbs.

And sort of in that vein, I concluded with this, which isn’t really Lange’s conclusion but mine:

While race and racism help to explain much of America’s twentieth-century land-use revolution—the suburbs; the mall; the destruction, controlled reinvention, and even privatization of the city—another core element is the car, and the logic of mass motoring.

Within the almost obvious observation that the mall is modeled after a downtown street is a much deeper insight: that the success of the mall, despite its complete car-centricity, is reliant on the magic trick of making the car disappear completely, so long as the customer remains inside.

The chief advantage of the mall over the urban downtown is not its car-centric nature outside, but its utter lack of cars inside. And the chief disadvantage of shopping and socializing in town is not the walkable nature of the street, but the constant noise and occasional menace of cars. The flight from downtown was a story of crime and race and fear from the beginning, but concerns about traffic safety were also cited in the earliest materials about suburban malls.

Like every magic trick, there is a concealed mechanism by which the “magic” occurs. In the case of the car-free mall, that subterfuge is the massive, bleak, frequently empty ocean of asphalt that renders the actual human-centered spaces into little stranded islands. (Look at a mall on the satellite map, and see how much more land the parking lot covers than the building.) That is the cost—once mass motoring is assumed—of retaining a carless walking and shopping experience. The intrinsic logic of suburban, car-oriented land use, which merges stuff with cars, is a poison pill for human commerce and socializing. Suburbia, and the mall that typifies it, is all about escaping the very thing on which it necessarily relies. There is something absurd and even perverse about this.

Perhaps there’s even a more precise and pointed way to put this, but I think (if I may say so myself) that this is a deep insight. If you ask people if they like walking along a street with fast cars zooming by, or if they like motor noise, or if they want their kids playing on streets with constant traffic, almost everyone will say no.

But we don’t really perceive these downsides of car dependence as the consequences of choices. Once something becomes the default, it no longer feels like we have any control over it. Once you realize that suburbia is a combination of being dependent on the car and trying to escape from it, it looks different. And once you realize that cars degrade the experience of cities, cities look different too.

And a final thought. Lange’s complicated judgment on the mall reminds me of this, an anecdote I recalled in a recent piece:

I’ll give you an example (aside from my own work, such as this long piece on exactly this subject). A former researcher with the Congress for the New Urbanism said to me once that she had misgivings about disdain for suburbia and enthusiasm for wholesale redevelopment. It sounded, she said, a little like urban renewal. And the crime of urban renewal should have taught us to have more humility when it comes to engineering the built environment.

In the rush to redevelop malls, I wonder if this humility and caution applies. There are malls that have evolved into quirky collections of independent businesses—people treating these big and seemingly underutilized spaces as canvases for their ideas. As spaces for opportunity. In some ways, all this surplus commercial space is a resource. I wonder if we’ll miss it when it’s gone.

I also want to share some interesting bits from the book that didn’t make it into my piece. These are quotes or observations I found noteworthy and worth thinking about:

As late as the 1970s, Lange describes growing up in the Northeast and walking to run errands with her mother, who owned a backpack for carrying home groceries. It was only once her family moved to Durham, North Carolina that they started driving for most errands.

“The mall provided the balm of anonymity.”

“The scale of new, auto-driven development required commercial architecture of a size to match.”

“What may well be the first use of ‘gentrification’ in the New Yorker arrived in relation to shopping, not housing.”

Lange describing the retrofitting of cities for easy motoring: “The tissue connecting residential communities to retail streets was cut.”

In a section about “mall walkers,” Lange observes, “Commercial imperatives accidentally created an architecture that accommodates those who often have the least societal power: the young, the old, the disabled, and the poor.”

Lots more too. It’s a really great, serious, fun book.

And finally, while this isn’t really about dead malls, given the title of Lange’s book, I have to show you this image, screenshotted from a Facebook group I follow:

Now that’s a cover for a book.

Related Reading:

The Supermarket Downstairs

Your (and More) Thoughts on Parking Anxiety

Is Car Centricity Permanent?

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