Mall Pall

We've seen plenty of stories in recent years about how shopping malls are dying. But yesterday I saw one from The Guardian, and figured that if even the mall-challenged British are noticing, then it must be a big story.

The article attributes the end of malls to a renascence of urban retail, and the growth of online shopping. Those trends may be real, but it misses the biggest competitor: big box stores. They also claim that young people are rejecting older generations' mall culture. But a look around a mall today shows they make up a big part of the clientèle. Attributing cultural changes to young people being simply different is lazy journalism.  Also, they keep citing examples of dead and dying malls that just happen to be in rust belt communities where pretty much everything is decaying.  But whatever the reasons, shopping malls have hit a wall - many still do a lot of business, but no one is building them. 

Judging by my other tastes and values, I should hate malls. They're ugly temples of conformity, promoting mindless consumption and car-centric cities. But really, I've always had an affection for these retail behemoths. Maybe it's the pseudo-social atmosphere that lets you be private and public at the same time. Maybe it's the weird way it shows-off a community's aspirations. Or it's the fact that for all the external ugliness and internal blandness, it's still the grandest architecture we regularly experience. No matter the reason for my love of malls, it has helped that I came of age after they had become the dominant retail format. Earlier generations watched the mall eat away at beloved civic institutions and never forgave them for it.

Their complaint was that malls replaced downtown shops, as well as town squares. But what they didn't realize was that while malls destroyed those institutions, they also replaced them. The town square may no longer be the meeting place for the city, but at least the mall provided a new meeting place. And that's why I now lament the disappearance of malls. Big box stores have all the same negatives as malls, but without that positive of being a meeting place.  Hopefully something will replace the social function of the meeting place.  Otherwise, the Walmart greeters are going to get really tired of throwing loiterers out of the store.