ancient cities

however, on the place of origin: the United
States.
The most important predecessors to the shopping
mall were built in the interbellum period in
places like the outskirts of Baltimore, Lake
Forest, Los Angeles, and Kansas City. The earliest
examples were variations on the strip mall
and show a gradual evolution toward insularity
through innovations such as site integration,
pedestrianization, escalators, enclosure and climate
control, and the positioning of storefronts
and parking. A great deal of attention has been
paid to the life, ideas, and accomplishments of
the developer and urbanist Victor Gruen. Gruen’s
motivations were at once commercial and ideological:
Following thinkers like Luis Mumford,
Gruen believed that the private car was largely
responsible for destroying community coherence
in suburban environments. His solution to the
proliferation of soulless commercial strips was a
novel one:
By affording opportunities for social life and recreation
in a protected pedestrian environment, by
incorporating civic and educational facilities, shopping
centers can fill an existing void. They can
provide the needed place and opportunity for participation
in modern community life that the
ancient Greek Agora, the Medieval Market Place
and our own Town Squares provided in the past.
The first suburban malls powerfully emulated
city centers; the plan for Northgate Shopping Center
(1950) in the Northgate area of Seattle, for example,
was based on downtown Seattle. Following several
major successes, the form, content, and structure of
the mall was honed, perfected, and later reproduced
at a dizzying rate, first across North America, and
later globally. During the lucrative “golden age” of
mall development, 28,500 malls were constructed
in North America alone and soon claimed over half
of all retail sales there. Meanwhile, the first out-oftown
shopping centers started to appear on the
European continent (town center and district centers
had been built since the 1950s), often after a
prolonged planning struggle.
As shopping malls permeated every corner of the
American suburban environment and saturated the
retail market, success could no longer be taken for
granted. Toward the end of the golden age, new
malls were built increasingly larger and with more
Shopping Center
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facilities in order to lure customers away from
existing ones: regional and superregional malls
overpowered their smaller counterparts and were
themselves trounced by the megamalls. In the hunt
for new markets, shopping center developers also
turned their attention to downtown locations,
strongly encouraged by city officials. Since the
1990s, factory outlet centers, the Internet, and
especially big-box retailing—signaling a return to
the strip mall concept—dealt yet another blow to
the traditional shopping mall. Since this time, the
mall has repeatedly been proclaimed dead, as
“grayfields” (underperforming or derelict retail
units) are becoming a more familiar element of the
retail landscape. Ironically, it is about this time that
North American–style shopping malls and strip
malls began penetrating further into Europe, Latin
America, and Asia, and to a lesser degree, the
Middle East and Africa.
The most visible and rapid transformation has
occurred in Central and Eastern Europe, where the
mall was embraced as a symbol of the transition to
modern capitalism and consumer culture. Often
containing a hypermarket rather than a department
store as an anchor and usually linked to
entertainment facilities and public transportation,
malls have sprung up in the outskirts of cities like
Moscow (Mega Mall), Prague (Palác Flóra),
Warsaw (Blue City), Lodz (Manufaktura), and
Budapest (e.g., Capona, Duna Plaza). In rapidly
developing parts of Asia and Latin America, North
American–style shopping malls have accompanied
suburbanization and the construction of edge cities
and gated communities.
Critique
The shopping mall has been the object of sustained
and vehement attack in academia for most of its
existence. Despite Victor Gruen’s intentions of
building a new community space and fostering
democratic virtues in suburbia, malls have become
a symbol for its vacuity and lack of social structure.
Gruen lamented in his later writings that his “environmental
and humane ideals were not only not
improved upon—they were completely forgotten.”
In the end, malls may replicate the appearance of
public space, by inserting common town-center elements
such as plazas, fountains, gardens and historicized
facades, but they remain tightly controlled
private environments in which all human activity