Fwd: Malls aren't us

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Fri Aug 17 08:05:43 PDT 2001


Le Monde diplomatique

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August 2001

AMERICAN BURBS

Malls aren't us

_________________________________________________________________

US-style shopping malls are taking over the world. Marketing maestros

mean to win consumers by selling them packaged authenticity and

commodified distinction. But Americans are tiring of the suburban way

of life and the assault of concrete, car and hard sell.

by our special correspondent TOM FRANK *

_________________________________________________________________

In the beginning was the Country Club Plaza, constructed in Kansas

City in the 1920s along with a vast fiefdom of surrounding

residential neighbourhoods. The Plaza was the world's first fully

planned, automobile-based suburban shopping centre. It was the

focus of a suburban fantasyland where houses come in flavours like

French provincial, Scottish baronial, and tidewater Virginia, and

the shopping centre itself is a perfect replica of Seville, in

Spain.

But it all seemed normal to me. I never considered how odd it was

for a residential neighbourhood to leave out sidewalks, or to

scatter old bits of European stuff (columns, statues, sundials,

etc) along its streets, or to call itself the Country Club

District. Every year we welcomed the traditional beginning of the

Christmas shopping season by flocking down to the Plaza to watch as

its world-famous holiday lights were switched on; we approved as

the Plaza's more plebeian tenants (grocery stores, bowling alleys)

disappeared in a (successful) effort to upgrade the area's class

identity; and we marvelled as the Plaza's planners dammed and

rerouted and contained and disinfected a nearby creek into a

Plaza-worthy pleasure pond.

It was a secession from the hardbitten life of Kansas City proper,

of course. But with its good schools, swimming pools, private

police forces and nearly all-white upper-class neighbourhoods where

property values never decline, the Country Club worked. It worked

so well that the Plaza is today a destination for tourists from all

across the Midwest. Now you can eat hamburgers with them in a

gritty teen hangout, which is a family-friendly replica of the old

1940s teen hangout ; you can hear people there make

self-deprecating remarks about their unfamiliarity with the ways of

the big city; you can see them ride around the department stores

and parking lots of the Plaza - the world's first car-oriented

shopping centre - in horse-drawn carriages.

What began at the Plaza continues now a hundred blocks to the south

and west, as the Kansas City suburbs stretch themselves over mile

after mile of former farmland, building gigantic shopping malls,

mirrored office buildings, "upper-bracket" neighbourhoods and

six-lane arterial roads on the farthest periphery of the urban

area. The far-off hills sprout McMansions and the busy

intersections that didn't exist a year ago are now tricked out with

brokerage offices and funky franchise restaurants and luxury

grocery stores.

The Oak Park shopping mall is the Kansas City metropolitan area's

largest, with 1.4 million square feet of retail space. I passed a

single vacant lot of unmowed prairie grass, brown from the intense

heat. For a second I wanted to investigate this indiscretion, to

find out how this one plot of familiar Kansas scenery came to be

overlooked by the developers, to wander out there and never come

back. Instead, I immersed myself in the powerfully air-conditioned

Nordstrom department store, a place where hearty masculine greeters

welcomed me to the fraternity of guys who wear Polo cologne and

select expensive sunglasses in wood panelled rooms while the manly

sounds of alt-rock crooning fill the air.

Stuffing your own teddy bear

Wandering deeper into Oak Park mall, I got more intimate with the

international corporations that rule this suburban realm. I found

the Warner Bros Studio Store, a friendly retail face for that

grandest of the culture mega-conglomerates, AOL Time Warner. The

purpose of the store seemed less to sell products than to give

consumers ways to interact with the company's brand: Instead of

offering, say, running shoes at different prices, made by a number

of different manufacturers, this store offered every imaginable

sort of article - watches, keychains, T-shirts - emblazoned with

Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and the rest of the loveable AOL Time

Warner cartoon gang.

Our own place in this corporate cosmos was hinted at just down the

mall at the Build-a-Bear Workshop, where a hyper-cheerful greeter

stationed at the shop's door invited me to express my individuality

by constructing a teddy bear. I could choose from several different

models, stuffing options and recorded sounds, she informed me,

striving for maximum adorability. In the final proof that

individualism is something that rolls off an assembly line, I was

invited to register this cute expression of my free choice in the

great electronic teddy bear census.

There is nothing unique or local about what is going on at the

Kansas City periphery. In the late 1950s the enclosed mall was

invented by a developer in Minneapolis, mainly for the sake of

efficiency and shopper comfort during the brutal northern winters.

Over the next 40 years this architectural form blossomed in vast

numbers from New York to Los Angeles, with few variations on its

basic themes: huge, box-like structures surrounded by parking lots

large enough to accommodate the maximum expected number of

shoppers; two or more "anchor" stores (usually one of the big

national department stores) at the outermost ends of the structure,

with the intervening space filled by boutique retailers; a food

court in which shoppers can choose from any number of fast-food

restaurants; an almost total lack of ornament on the structure's

exterior with all the architectural design and innovation being

reserved for the air-conditioned inside.

The Plaza was the inspired work of a single promethean developer;

the modern shopping mall, on the other hand, is possibly the most

studied and professionally refined landscape in the world. Building

and managing malls is an enormous industry, and enthusiastic

shopping is as vital to American prosperity as cheap oil. That is

why retailers and ad agencies employ anthropologists to study us

while we shop [1] Soundtracks are carefully chosen to soothe us or

hurry us along. Window displays and in-store posters are carefully

tested. From the lighting to the potted plants to the tenant mix,

nothing here is left to chance. Nothing is the way it is because

someone just thought it looked good.

Malls and the surrounding sprawl are a physical reflection of

sophisticated, predatory, modern capitalism. Strangely, though,

much of the recent American literature of suburbia insists on

casting the mall-based order as a transparent expression of the

popular will. Giant malls with giant parking lots and endlessly

wandering suburban subdevelopments are the way they are because we,

the people, want them that way. You may not like shopping malls,

but they are the creation of the market, the market is all about

choice, and so malls are what happens when you allow the people to

travel and choose freely. Malls are us.

This argument quickly descends into a familiar market populism in

which the landscape of capitalism is equated with the virtuous

common man, while any critique of suburban sprawl is dismissed as

self-righteous elitism. The debate over sprawl thus becomes a class

struggle in which a gang of egotistical high-hat leftists, in love

with planning and convinced that they know what's best, face off

against the real people, who choose the mall. So natural has this

ideological reflex become that one controversial mall designer

refers to himself as "the people's architect."

Flight to the cities

But it is not quite true. When people are actually asked about

sprawl - as opposed to having their opinions defined as identical

to the deeds of the corporate developers - it quickly becomes

obvious how much they hate it. Few people believe anymore that the

solution to urban woes is to drive a little further, set up a new

mall, slap together a shitty house, and spend all day driving back

and forth amongst the tiny trees in their four-wheel-drives. Young

people of means are flocking back to the cities deserted by their

parents, filling up the zoned "bohemian" neighbourhoods and sending

urban real estate prices soaring. And among those who stay in

suburbia nobody wants some new subdevelopment going up down the way

and making the traffic in their existing subdevelopment that much

worse.

This new anti-suburban mood is obvious even if you haven't heard

about the anti-sprawl movement. The longing to escape is, of

course, the soul of the suburban impulse, and these days it

expresses itself vividly at any shopping mall in the country.

Consumers are jaded and cynical with the suburban way, the industry

press insists. They don't want to visit yet another faceless mall.

They want experiences, not just stores and restaurants. They want

to feel like they're somewhere other than amongst the look-alike

cul-de-sacs and prefab manses of the burbs.

It takes an hour and a half to drive from the South Side of Chicago

to the Woodfield mall in suburban Schaumburg, Illinois. Constructed

in the early 1970s, Woodfield was until 10 years ago the largest

mall in the world (today it ranks third), with some five anchor

stores and 2m square feet of retail space. What goes on here, in

store after store and restaurant after restaurant, is the selling

of packaged authenticity and commodified rebellion against the

suburban way of life. You may live in an indistinguishable stretch

of tract housing and type away for hours in a cubicle like everyone

else, but with the help of the chain stores in this (or any) mall,

you can imagine yourself a rule-smashing iconoclast, a hardened

urban individualist, a person of distinguished tastes, a lone wolf

in a crowd of timid herd creatures. To the outside world the word

Schaumburg is shorthand for all that is conformist and soulless and

fake about suburbia. But Schaumburg itself thrives by dealing in

the cultural antidotes to conformity, soullessness and fakeness.

The first thing you notice is that almost everyone in the Woodfield

mall has an attitude. Fred, the salesman who helped me in the

Marshall Field department store, wears his head shaved with a tiny

ponytail in back. A mannequin display in that same store is

emblazoned with the bold declaration: "I Am What I Am." The

teenagers wandering about appear uniformly in sideburns, piercings,

and tattoos; I even saw a tattoo peeking out from the shoulder of

an adult shopper in line before me in the upscale Lord and Taylor

department store. Even Lane Bryant, a boutique for overweight

women, is pushing a "Revolution in Denim" along with teeshirts that

declare, simply, "Rebel."

This retail insurgency wouldn't make sense without frequent

reminders of the bland, debased, pre-hip culture we're rebelling

against. This is why several shops in the Woodfield mall go out of

their way to offer vivid images of the fatuity of earlier

suburbanites. A store called Lucky Brand moves units by mimicking

the innocent-looking advertising art of 50 years ago and dressing

what appear to be antique mannequins - with big, gullible smiles on

their faces - in the hippest of denim wear. The Fossil shop,

retailer of lord knows what, is decorated with numerous send-ups of

old-style logos and posters in which clueless airline stewardesses

wave happily and blithe men in fedoras smile broadly. But for us

it's alternative, authentic, extreme. Down in the Vans shop, one of

two skateboard-oriented stores I came across, teenagers skate back

and forth on an actual plywood half-pipe. Only a few years ago,

skating was thought to be an incorrigibly adversarial pursuit;

today it's in the mall like everything else.

Every single restaurant is themed, and every theme is billed as a

daring break from the usual. The rest of the suburban world may eat

bland store-bought white bread, but with the help of Au Bon Pain

you can put that conformist world behind you and even imagine

you're still in the good old urban neighbourhood, what with all its

crusty, European-style breadstuffs. At the Rainforest Café you can

pretend to dine in the pristine Amazon jungle. The cuisines of

China, Japan, Italy and California are all available. Microbrews

everywhere provide a soulful alternative to flavourless Budweiser.

(Not content to be identified as the default bland beer of

suburbia, Budweiser is firing back these days with an authenticity

push of its own, adopting as its new slogan the one-word

declaration, "True.") At the Vie de France I enjoyed a little fake

Parisian atmosphere, sipping vinegary Merlot at a pavement table

while watching the carefully coiffed teenagers flow nervously by

under the bright chrome light fixtures.

For the owners of other shopping centres, market forces have made

the last decade a time of disappointment and decline. With

management's power over labour greater than it had been in many

decades, Americans found they had less and less time to spend

wandering the air-conditioned byways of the local shopping mall.

They wanted things cheap and they wanted them now. In response, the

country witnessed an explosion of Big Box stores and Category

Killer retailers - massive, warehouse-style establishments where

overhead has been cut to the bone by the elimination of decoration

and delicate display cases. Here products are sold in bulk under

raw industrial lighting and naked steel rafters. Great mounds of

Clorox, Tide, and Colgate stretched nearly all the way to the

30-foot-high ceiling, stripped of their brand magic and piled up

like any other commodity.

Usually one finds Big Box stores on the outskirts of town, where

land is cheap. But in Kansas City, Costco Wholesale store is in

midtown, on the site of a neighbourhood of apartments and

nightclubs. Here there once stood a legendary bar called Milton's,

the last surviving piece of the Count Basie/Charlie Parker jazz

scene of the 1930s. Its owners had clung to their programme of

cheap drinks, dim lighting, a great record collection, unchanged

(and unironic) 1940s décor, and live jazz nightly all the way up

into the early 1990s. But Milton's, located right on the street,

seemed to stand in the way of everything that was safe and

desirable according to then-current development standards. It had

to make way for progress. Today it's a Costco parking lot.

______________________________________________________________

[1] See Franck Mazoyer, "The science behind shopping", Le Monde

diplomatique English edition, December 2000.

* Author of The Conquest of Cool (University of Chicago Press,

Chicago, 1997) and One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market

Populism and the end of Economic Democracy (Doubleday, New York,

2000).

Original text in English

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