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Like a cosmos where
the light never dims, shopping malls play multiple roles in modern-day culture: that
of a Godless paradise, of a timeless space, of an absolute getaway without landmarks.
The shopping mall is an entertainment venue, and its greatest achievement lies in
cultivating the fantasy that one has stopped existing in some way without ever really
dying. With its background music, controlled climate and round-the-clock operations,
the polished halls of a mall stand as a metaphor for a happy trip to nowhere in particular—a
perfect holiday.
In contrast to the places where people work, the shopping mall acts as an oasis where
the world of holidays is in incessant rebirth and regeneration, as an enclosed space
where time never acquires a restrictive dimension, where sensations obey the calls
of seduction, availability, flattery and reward instead of duty and penance. Streets
in shopping malls are circuits turned towards providing entertainment or pleasure,
just as holidays, at least in their intent. The world’s largest mall—Canada’s West
Edmonton in the western province of Alberta—covers a space equivalent to 100 football
pitches, and according to Jeremy Rifkin, author of The Age of Access, contains the
largest indoor amusement park in the world, the largest indoor waterpark, a golf
course, 800 shops, 11 department stores, 110 restaurants, an ice-skating rink, 13
nightclubs and 20 cinemas.
The plans for the planet’s very first mall were drawn up in 1924 by J. C. Nichols
in Kansas City, and the centre that resulted, with its Mediterranean architecture,
tiled fountains and cast-iron balconies, became the prototype for those built after
World War II. All shopping malls currently boast similar fountains, waterfalls, tropical
plants, ocean blue patios, marble sightlines and the latest pop tunes. This host
of links between the holiday and the shopping centre helps alleviate the distress
caused by regimented time.
There are no clocks in shopping centres, and no impatience over wasting valuable
time. In contrast to nature’s boundless space, the mall offers an illuminated cavern
that has neither beginning nor end, but is shaped like a Moebius strip. Within it,
time is shattered, and what is left in place is space made fun.
The average American, according to sociologist William Kowinski, author of the The
Malling of America, visits a shopping mall every ten days, and spends over an hour
and a quarter there on each occasion; the most frequently given reason for this pilgrimage
is a desire for “entertainment.” Indeed the shopping malls of the future have been
billed as entertainment centres in which people will be able to shed the burden of
their own selves. Minnesota’s Mall of America, which until just recently was the
largest in the world, is visited by over 45 million people each year, among them
package tourists from Australia. The place has become a kind of sacred site of the
sort discussed by the late Romanian philosopher Mircea Eliade. It has the same power
of attraction as Mecca or the Vatican, where one has to go at least once in a lifetime.
Working is the mundane side of life, but being a consumer is potentially its most
poetic or symbolic pay-off. While the average worker is asked to be realistic and
pragmatic, consumption can stimulate every possible dream, even the dream of salvation
in the form of liberation from the constraints of space and time.
Nothing seems to threaten this walled kingdom protected by security guards and watched
over by increasing numbers of closed circuit cameras. Sociologist Peter Hemingway
has argued that the mission of mall architects and designers consists in providing
a sugared dream, where one can buy, play and experience without ever having to go
outside—where one can change experience like one switches television channels, using
the credit card as the all-powerful Open Sesame.
Loudspeakers, closed circuit cameras, video recorders and monitors are integral parts
of a system that is aimed at the production of a totally autonomous universe. Inside
the mall’s walls, it can be spring even if snow is falling on the streets outside,
or autumn though it is baking hot under the summer sun. Weather has no real meaning,
and is only a pretext for a change in fashion. Different segments of the mall can
resemble Thailand, the Tyrol, China or Canada, since its inner space has been transformed
into a dolled-up universe, just like paradise. In Scottsdale, Arizona, the Borgata
reproduces the Tuscan village of San Gimignano in the middle of the desert, while
Olde Mistic Village in Connecticut is a carbon copy of the main street in a New England
town from around the start of the 17th century. The vogue for copying, a key trait
of global society, has forged an alliance with the shopping mall in its bid to make
places and dates vanish. In the inaugural ceremony for West Edmonton, one of the
centre’s creators, Nader Ghermezion, declared that people would no longer have to
“go to New York, Paris, Disneyland or Hawaii. We can offer you all that here!”
Assembled under one roof, built to copy the best of all worlds, with a selection
of the best the globe can offer. Whereas any given shop in a city has had to choose
its urban location in accordance with historical and geographical dictates, the shopping
mall is free from any such demographic tradition—indeed it is free from history entirely.
The main criterion for a mall’s location is simple: how fast people can get there.
The mall is constantly changing its appearance, anchoring itself to an evolving present
in a magical process that eludes all threat of death. Freed from the pull of gravity,
the mall is now society’s most revered safety valve, with such importance as a social
and political symbol that terrorists intent on disrupting normal life choose it as
a prime target. By planting a bomb in a mall, they attack the contemporary vision
of dreamland. In this “spaceship,” the city’s most benevolent and leisurely impulses
are now distilled. The world of work, illness and repression has been extracted;
all that remains is soft-flowing leisure and purchasing power.
Independent, beyond the pull of gravity, open all hours, without prisons, sweet-smelling,
tropical and radiant, the shopping mall is a parody of utopia. Mornings are the same
as afternoons, Sundays as Mondays, China as Argentina, Rome as New York; potential
purchases are in abundance, changing only to match the spiral of constant progress
and advertising themselves as the best items going. Faced with this spectacle, the
visitor is invited to partake of the profusion as if he or she were on holiday and
about to dive into the sea. Buying becomes like dipping in the ocean—disappearing,
forgetting oneself and everything else. All becomes one in the newest passion of
the day.
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The shopping mall acts as an oasis
where the world of holidays
is in incessant rebirth
and regeneration
Working is the mundane
side of life,
but being a consumer
is potentially
its most poetic or
symbolic pay-off
The mall is constantly
changing its appearence,
anchoring itself to an evolving
present in a magical process
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