The American shopping mall and its local and global relevance

Last week I made an obligatory trip to my hometown’s trendy indoor mall, known as the Roseville Galleria, which is located roughly 20 miles from the downtown area of Sacramento. I loathe everything about the suburban shopping mall experience (Inflated prices! Youths!), and during the hurried stroll to make a return I came to a sudden halt in front of a wall interspersed with air ducts and speech bubble-shaped appliqués. Lingering, I excitedly recognized that I was witness to a storyboard of several local and global processes at work.

The speech bubbles, in their expanse and proximity, were aggressively chiming to an invented collective opinion that the mall in question was not just a place to buy things, where dispassionate economic transactions occur within a contained space segregated by a radial half-mile of asphalt wasteland. On the contrary, they rather glowingly proclaimed that mall was the heart and community focal point of the suburb which it borders. “It’s our town square,” avers one bubble. It’s not “just a mall, but to this community it is so much more,” supports another.

Since their rise in the mid-1950s, malls have been criticized universally for their infixed sense of placelessness. Locality and human agency are deemphasized, and malls are treated as consumption-driven, globalized spaces outturned from the same figurative cookie cutter. “I was interested in the creeping loss of regional differences,” said Michael Galinsky, who in 1989 drove across the country and documented malls across America. “I thought a lot about (photographer Robert) Frank's ‘The Americans’ as we drove from place to place without any sense of place.” But the ventilation-speech bubble camel was arguing just the opposite; that, the Galleria actually had a specific place-based identity and going as far as to declare it the “town square,” the holy grail of public spaces.  

Residents of Roseville are the upper-crust of the region, and with their high incomes and spending habits perhaps the Galleria could be accurately valued as a symbol of the community. Yet to reach out and claim that the Galleria serves as the harmonious host to both high-end consumerism and civic engagement is like saying the Dallas Cotton Bowl houses the nation’s bro-iest sporting events while serving as a premier gay wedding venue: Like oil and vinegar, the former would fundamentally repel the latter.

I do agree that the Galleria is a geographically bound expression, but that this has more to with its regional relationship to the city of Sacramento rather than any near resemblance to a public space. Places, cities, and entire regions compete, and the speech bubbles are part of a larger city image-making campaign which seeks to attract economic development away from Sacramento to the urban fringe. This is nothing new, and the current era of globalization has proven the power of America’s suburban cities to attract such activities. However, in competing with the historically “central city,” Roseville is issuing and potentially acting on promises of placemaking to strategically differentiate itself- a technique which has most prominently been used by planners and “new urbanists” to reclaim the urban core by revaluing public space.

Notable examples of placemaking include the New York City Streets Renaissance, which since 2005 has turned several streets spaces into public plazas (think NY Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan’s overhaul of the Times Square portion of Broadway). Recently Rick Snyder, the governor of Michigan, has adopted placemaking as a statewide economic strategy. For Detroit, the hope is that the vanishing city would be stymied by the infusion of place capital through the improvement of streets and public space in key focal points for neighborhood urban renewal. Sacramento has also pursued its own variety of placemaking strategies, with a special focus on making the midtown neighborhood more attractive to families who have increasingly decided to nest in Roseville and the outlying suburbs.

At the global scale, the Roseville example is one of several examples which demonstrate that the contemporary link between globalization and urbanization is not strictly sameness or monoculture. The uniqueness of “place” still has a place, so to speak, where malls are the outcomes of a global capitalist logic of production and consumption with local political, cultural, and social influences.

But the example of the Galleria stands out because it underscores the additional regional dynamic existing between the city and the periphery. Suburban planners and developers are able to undermine the regional planning process by co-opting techniques originally used by central city planners to encourage economic growth. Where central planners have been able to showcase their natural endowment of public spaces, suburban planners have shrewdly understood the need to market their own veneers of public space.

An urban fringe command of place capital, it would then seem, may play an adverse role on several fronts: Among them, by sustaining the suburbanizing process, and contributing to the impoverishment of the central city where an unparalleled wealth of cultural amenities, including truly open civic spaces, does exist.

Correspondingly, suburban placemaking is often tied to projects hostile to smart growth reforms and other attempts to control urban sprawl. At this critical juncture, where cities have taken center stage in environmental policies and politics, the success at achieving state mandates to reduce greenhouse gas emissions may partially depend on the skills of suburban developers to gloss professions of community and accessibility over a determinedly compartmentalized and automobile-dependent landscape.