Le Monde diplomatique
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August 2001
AMERICAN BURBS
Malls aren't us
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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 *
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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.
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[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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