So: last week, Jason Myles of the This Is Revolution podcast talked to me for an hour about an article of mine about the concatenated [American] processes of motorization, suburbanization, and mallification which Sublation published some months back. Though I don’t think I made too much a fool of myself (I’m a better scribbler than speaker), there were some points that I had neither the opportunity nor perhaps the presence of mind to expound upon. Permit me to do so here.
It’s true that Victor Gruen’s aspirations for the mall verged on the quixotic. He truly did believe that his shopping centers, if executed properly—meaning that they’d be built as the focal points of conscientiously planned mixed-use neighborhoods with various kinds of housing (both single- and multi-family), businesses, and civic sites, all within a reasonable walking distance of each other—would be a panacea for the problems that were baked into the postwar suburb from the start. One such problem, which Gruen recognized very early on, was the difficulty of cultivating community life in a built environment that lacked spaces where it could flourish.
The regional shopping mall—which in Gruen’s imagination hosted libraries, auditoriums, and dedicated meeting places for community groups in addition to stores selling apparel, appliances, and toys—was intended to be a place where denizens of the nearby planned communities and the sprawling residential divisions beyond could come and do things together, meet new people, and create the cultural life present in both rural and urban communities, but lacking in the suburbs. Generally speaking, these new towns were places where nobody had generational roots or longstanding ties with the families that were their neighbors, where residents shortly demonstrated their willingness and indeed eagerness to pull up stakes and move to more prestigious neighborhoods when they could afford to, where the workplace was far from home and where people living on the same streets were unlikely to be colleagues, and where there was nothing like the commonality of the premodern rural village where people worked the land and produced goods domestically. From the beginning, these were impersonal and temporary places—which naturally followed from the family home’s transformation, in concept and in actual use, from a generations-spanning base of life to the principal financial asset of the burgeoning postwar middle class.
Gruen was also skeptical that the unplanned roadside businesses popping up on pedestrian-unfriendly thoroughfares could serve as adequate substitutes for the prewar American town’s main street or town square, the European boulevard, or the agora of Athens in its prime in terms of their social and cultural functions. Experience bears out his doubts. If you happen to live in a suburb, think of any occasion where you had to run errands of an afternoon—driving from the dry cleaners to the hardware store to the supermarket, stopping once for coffee at Dunkin Donuts and again for lunch at Chipotle. At any point during the trip did you feel yourself in tune with the vital rhythm of your community, the idiosyncratic life of the place you call home? Probably not. You crept along with traffic you wished would move faster, and grumbled at every red light and every queue in the left-turn lane, conscious of the minutes of your day slipping past while you were immured in the driver’s seat. You disliked the journey, you were in a hurry when you arrived at any of your destinations, and the people you passed by were are just as velocitized and singularly fixated on their own business as you were.
So thanks to the genius of Herr Gruen, we have the regional shopping mall, where we leave our cars in the parking lot and tend to our away-from-home chores at a relaxed pace in a climate-controlled atrium where it’s much easier to make spur-of-the-moment detours, serendipitously find familiar faces, and feel at ease in the presence of strangers far less harried and agitated than the train of motorists on the local highway.
But the extent to which visiting a shopping mall actually fosters community spirit or bonds is dubious at best. Can consumption alone truly link people together in bonds of fellowship, common purpose, and mutual obligation? Because in spite of how promiscuously the word is tossed around today, that’s what “community” actually means—and fandoms, fashions, and fetishes are inadequate vehicles for arriving at it.
Gruen believed the mall needn’t be just a venue where one could mill about and buy clothes and gewgaws as a stranger among strangers—and it’s worth noting how emphatically he recommended that management host a variety of local events (concerts, flower shows, craft fairs, and the like), and host them often. Even so, and even when his message fell on amenable ears, he overestimated the mall’s power to countervail powerful social trends which it either had no control over or to which it indirectly contributed—for instance, declining participation in civic groups, plummeting church attendance (however you feel about organized religion, it does bring people together), and the consequences of the electronic media revolution.
When we talk about malls as places of “community,” it usually seems as though we’ve gotten our concept of community confounded with that of the casual, fleeting encounter. What sense of shared identity and purpose unifies the people browsing in the Apple Store or Forever 21? How are fifty people eating at separate tables in a food court—all poking at their phones with buds jammed in their ears—much less estranged than they would be if they’d stayed at home and ordered Grubhub? Why should my relationship with the temporary face at the counter of Gamestop or Books-A-Million be anything but transactional?1 If I go to a mall with a serviceable arcade and play several rounds against someone at Marvel Vs. Capcom or whatever, or chat with the person in front of me in the line for an Instagram pop-up, how likely is it really that in a few years we’ll be watching each other’s kids or giving one another rides to work when one of our cars is in the shop?2
When Alexandra Lange (author of Meet Me By the Fountain) writes about her hopes for the reinvented twenty-first-century mall as a place—perhaps the place—where suburbanites (who still compose more than half of the United States’ population) can come together, it can be hard to share her enthusisam. We’ve evidently arrived at a point where simply being outside of the home and in the presence of the crowd, and perhaps making courteous pleasantries with a person working a cash register, are an improvement over our default state of sitting in bed or on the couch and quietly gazing into a backlit screen. It isn’t enough—but as Lange repeatedly argues, it’s the best we’re realistically capable of, our political economy being what it is. (She puts a much shinier gloss on the fact than I’m inclined to.) Moving libraries and local businesses into floundering malls, building mid-rise housing in their parking lots, or repurposing derelict department stores as adult learning centers might be decent ways of using these spaces—better for their host towns than letting them hollow out and crumble, surely—but it ain’t gonna reverse decade upon decade of social disintegration or do much at all to stymie its advance.
Some notes on the intractable problems of motorization—since neither postwar suburbanization nor mallification could have played out the way they did in the absence of normative automobile ownership and the infrastructure supporting it.
Let’s start with Marshall McLuhan’s synopsis of the matter in Understanding Media:
When the motorcar was new, it exercised the typical mechanical pressure of explosion and separation of functions. It broke up family life, or so it seemed, in the 1920s. It separated work and domicile, as never before. It exploded each city into a dozen suburbs, and then extended many of the forms of urban life along the highways until the open road seemed to become nonstop cities. It created the asphalt jungles, and caused 40,000 square miles of green and pleasant land to be cemented over. With the arrival of plane travel, the motorcar and truck teamed up together to wreck the railways. Today small children plead for a train ride as if it were a stagecoach or horse and cutter: “Before they're gone, Daddy.”
The motorcar ended the countryside and substituted a new landscape in which the car was a sort of steeplechaser. At the same time, the motor destroyed the city as a casual environment in which families could be reared. Streets, and even sidewalks, became too intense a scene for the casual interplay of growing up. As the city filled with mobile strangers, even next-door neighbors became strangers. This is the story of the motorcar, and it has not much longer to run.
Oh, Marshall. You sweet crazy summer child.
Six decades after Understanding Media’s publication, the United States’ “love affair” with the personal automobile is still far from running its course. One wonders why it’s so often called a love affair; at this point it’s surely more like the fractious marriage of a Catholic couple that can never get a divorce.
A 2019 article in the New York Times cites several studies on the negative impacts of traffic. One links roadway congestion to domestic violence. Another found that American motorists would happily trade five minutes of leisure time to spend one less minute stuck in traffic. Another found that Los Angeles residents are more concerned with traffic problems than issues “pertaining to personal safety, finances or housing costs.” Yet another reports that in the United States “the total cost of traffic associated with lost time and wasted fuel exceeds $100 billion per year.” Then there are the deleterious health effects of routinely sucking in auto exhaust on a backed-up highway for long periods of time…
Everyone wishes there were fewer cars on the road.3 Nobody sees anything of beauty in the dense bricolage of strip malls, fast food chains, car dealerships, gas stations, office complexes, and billboards crowding the typical suburban thoroughfare. Everyone pretty much acknowledges that the auto insurance industry is a state-sanctioned protection racket. Nobody wants to live in the vicinity of a busy roadway. Everyone convulses when the price of gasoline goes up. Nobody but the obstinately boneheaded climate change denialist fails to see automobile emissions as a cord in the noose around our civilization’s neck. Everyone dislikes street parking and resents putting money into a meter. Nobody ever took pleasure from schlepping across a large and active parking lot. Everyone whose morning and evening commutes reliably consist of idling on a backed-up highway for an hour or longer recognizes the amalgamated flavors of misanthropy and ressentiment creeping onto their tongues from the back of their throats.4 Nobody who grew up in a diffuse, car-dominated suburb didn’t spend lonely afternoons and evenings before they hit driving age wishing to god it were possible to just put on their shoes, walk out the door, and go somewhere.
Clearly we made a colossal blunder in developing our ground transportation infrastructure and the landscapes of our postwar settlements around the use of private automobiles. But whatever can we do about it now?
The enlightened suburban liberal really likes the idea of a renaissance in public transportation—but isn’t going to raise his voice to demand it or go out of his way to fight for it, because he has no intention whatsoever of using it himself.
I’m imagining for a moment that the suburb I grew up in decided to heavily invest in a fleet of buses. Who’d ride them?
Nobody who’s accustomed to coming and going whenever they please wants to start having to plan their day around a bus schedule. Nobody wants to trudge twenty minutes from their front door to a streetside kiosk in the heat of July or the chill of January—not when they’re used to turning on their car to get the heat or A/C going, running back inside to have a cup of coffee and look at Facebook, and then returning to a comfortably temperate interior. Nobody wants to get off at their stop and then plod ten minutes, cars whizzing past them, to reach the place they’re actually going—not when they already have the option to climb into their car in their driveway, and step out of it again in their destination’s parking lot. Nobody wants to stare out the window while their bus snakes through town on an indirect course to the place they’re trying to get to—because even if they despise congestion and traffic lights, the pleasure of feeling themselves in control over their progress from Point A to Point B outweighs their frustration at not being able to make the trip as quickly or easily as they’d like.
Examples fail me, but I’m sure each of us has seen a film or television series, or read a novel or comic book, in which a man foolishly spurns a woman who’d make an excellent lifelong match for him because his toxic inamorata activates him in ways the “good girl” does not. That’s more or less how public transit enters into the “love affair” metaphor. It’s the sensible choice we just can’t bring ourselves to make. The sunken cost fallacy also applies here—although in this case it’s hardly a fallacy when reversing course would require spending hundreds of billions of dollars, entail a long and painful transition, and revoke from the masses the privilege of autonomous, far-reaching mobility which their cars grant them.
Throughout his autobiography Shopping Town, Victor Gruen is prone to getting sidetracked when the topic of cars comes up, and breaks off into tangents about how much automobile culture pisses him off. Some two hundred pages in, he gets to the heart of the matter:
But the mistaken belief in a permanent increase of the automobile stock is only part of the larger myth that unrestrained material growth will continue in all areas. Besides this superstitious belief in constant growth, affluent citizens have two unrealistic dreams that are closely related. They are based on a widespread desire to transfer the customs and traditions of a feudal society to a democratic welfare society. In feudal societies, the upper ten-thousandth of the population retained an excess of privilege, which included the privilege of individual mobility through the use of riding horses and coaches. This then created a sufficient amount of envy and annoyance in the underprivileged to produce changes that terminated a large part of the privilege. But this mobility privilege of the rich, while it lasted, did not result in traffic jams or require superhighways or traffic lights. It was satisfied by tree-shaded avenues.
Furthermore, an exceptionally privileged member of the feudal population could afford both a town palace and a country estate, which often took the form of a pleasure palace, grand hunting lodge, or villa. This also created annoyance among the underprivileged, but it in no way led to a significant loss of agricultural land or natural landscape.
But in an affluent society, if the privileges initially enjoyed by the “upper ten thousand” are claimed by the “upper millions,” and those millions wish to drive their own coaches and live in their own pleasure palaces (or second homes with gardens), then the dream of an affluent citizen becomes a nightmare. Everyone must be angry at everyone else, because everyone finds that everyone else is getting in their way. On top of this, the feudal behavior of the upper millions causes irreparable environmental damage. In our own bitter experience, we can already see today that the promise of individual mobility for millions ultimately results in collective immobility.
However hypocritical or oblivious this might all sound coming from the guy who invented the shopping mall, this decades-old tirade of old man Gruen’s would be music to the ears of the degrowth crowd—but it also insinuates the hopelessness of their economic philosophy ever gaining traction in a nation such as ours. No individual wants to surrender his perks or conveniences for the benefit of the collective—especially not when he (correctly) anticipates seeing members of the parasitic elite continuing to freely enjoy what he was made to give up. Moreover, any political party of a representative government that dares to pass legislation imposing austere restrictions on the purchase, ownership, and use of lifestyle-defining goods will shortly be out of power, and its policies reversed.5 Only under extraordinary conditions have the people of the United States ever consented en masse to material sacrifice, and the last true instance was the second World War.
This naturally suggests that nothing short of an event as catastrophic and disruptive as the march of the Axis powers can deliver us unto a switch point where we’d even countenance the idea of substituting cars for buses, trams, trains, electric bikes, etc., and retooling our towns and cities such that their use makes more sense. As it does with most things, here the grim conventional wisdom of our hypernormalized epoch holds true: things will have to get crazier before they can start to get sane.
The most I experienced of community spirit inside of a mall were during those years when I worked at one, and those associations tend to be short-lived. Hawking T-shirts, ringing up video games, and steaming lattes are jobs that earn little pay and even less respect, so the longer you remain, the more likely it is that the coworkers you make friends with will bounce when they get “real” jobs, go back to school, or get fed up and opt for a maybe slightly better gig doing pretty much the same thing twenty miles away. As for customers—there were some I made friends with over the years, but it can be hard to get to know a person when you’re at work and they’re not, though you’re both in the same room. (Although when I was a teenaged Hot Topic employee, I did get handed quite a few phone numbers.) In either case, as soon as I or they moved on, they pretty quickly became names in my AIM buddy list I stopped paying attention to and/or and Facebook updates I scrolled past—and I was much the same to them.
It is worth noting, however, that I’ve made more durable friendships with people alongside whom I’ve earned a wage than with those I’ve met up with on the basis of a shared interest in stuff like Magic: The Gathering or fighting games.
Okay, sure—in this last case we’re probably expecting too much from a rando we meet in a mall somewhere. But then where does today’s average adult meet people with whom he or she can forge that kind of relationship?
Excepting auto manufacturers, oil companies, and the elected representatives whose campaigns they bankroll, of course.
Side note: I’ve long maintained that a lot of people recall their college years so fondly because it was the only time they got to enjoy a pedestrian lifestyle. The places on campus where they ate, studied [worked], and socialized were all within walking distance of where they showered and slept—and even if they didn’t think much about it at the time, they loved it.
Historical note: only slightly fewer House and Senate Democrats voted to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment than Republicans. Neither party could be punished at the ballot box for outlawing alcohol because large majorities of both were in favor of it. Perhaps the degrowther can find solace and hope in this proof of what a relatively small group of singleminded activists with white-knuckled determination is capable of achieving—until he considers the the stark differences between the political cultures of the early twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, and resumes tearing at his scalp in despair.