A writer meditates on loving and loathing some of the country’s most common public spaces — except are they really public? Were they ever?
The mall is “ubiquitous and underexamined and potentially a little bit embarrassing,” the design critic Alexandra Lange notes in the introduction to her new book, Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall. Shopping is part of our daily lives, as are the spaces where we do it. Malls are fixtures of our physical and psychic landscapes, embedded with social and personal histories. They’re loaded symbols within our culture, inspiring feelings of allegiance or contempt. In George Romero’s famous 1978 movie, Dawn of the Dead, the mall is a home for humans and zombies alike. In the third season of the ’80s-nostalgic TV show Stranger Things, it’s simultaneously a place of teenage possibility and a Russian front for a sci-fi lab. In contemporary “ruin porn” photography, the empty shells of malls represent the just deserts of late-stage capitalism.
What makes malls the object of both longing and disdain? The civic purpose of the mall—unlike libraries, schools, and museums—has never been entirely clear. “In contrast to many other forms of public architecture, which embody fear, power, and knowledge, the mall is personal,” Lange writes. It’s not an institution, officially speaking, but it is social, a rare type of place intended to encourage hanging out. “At their best, malls create community through shared experience,” Lange says; at their worst, they’re temples to consumerism. They offer freedom—from parents, strict rules, the weather—even as they’re policed. They’re public, sort of, but also private, providing convenience at a price. Malls are not necessarily the communal spaces we would design for ourselves, but in a country short on alternatives, they’re the ones we’ve been given. Is it any surprise that we want them to be so much more?
