"Unable to compete with online shopping, declining consumer affluence, rising oil prices, and a volatile property market, shopping malls are dropping like flies. The CEO of a major shopping mall building company recently warned that “within ten to fifteen years” the shopping mall “will be a historical anachronism — a sixty-year aberration that no longer meets the public’s needs."...
The inventor of the American suburban shopping mall,Victor Gruen, was a Viennese architect and socialist forced to flee to the United States after the occupation of Austria in 1938. Gruen saw the mall as having the potential to re-centralize suburban sprawl. His plans were for large state-owned indoor agoras that would literally contain the market forces that were running rampant outside their walls. It was a modernist vision for the refounding of American public life. Many of the malls built by Gruen and his company in the 1950s retained elements of this promise, with his Southdale Mall in Edina, Minn., planned around an enormous common meeting place modeled on a European piazza...
Meanwhile, the aggressive, unquestioned privatization of such spaces has led to the expulsion of the homeless and the banning of public demonstrations. After a series of Supreme Court rulings in the 1970s and 1980s following political protests in shopping malls, First Amendment rights are not applicable within shopping malls."
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/04/the-last-shopping-mall/
FB: "Today’s shopping malls are worlds in themselves, removed in both time and space from the chance play and chaotic bustle of the high street. They are carnivals of artificiality where time and space are collapsed under the eternal sun of fluorescent lights. The West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, has a Chinatown, a Bourbon Street, and a replica of the Santa Maria."
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