Marta Werbanowska

How the suburban society shaped shopping centers and how shopping centers shape the suburban society
Since the very beginning of the 20th century, cities and shopping agglomerations in the United States have always gone hand in hand. It is difficult to even imagine one without the other, as people need to shop for, at least, their basic everyday products, and the stores simply need customers. The cities are clusters of individual people, families, communities, just as the shopping centers are clusters of stores. The two phenomena, to a large extent, even seem to have the same reason for their very origin namely, commercialism. Numerous large cities, especially the ones which gained their significance in the industrial era at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, emerged due to the commercial reasons gathering everyone and everything in a single place was simply more efficient and more economical for everyone, and as the clustered factories needed hundreds of employees each, thousands of people came to settle in their vicinity, creating new, extensive communities. The spirit of nearly every city is the spirit of productivism, focused on having things done quickly, cheaply, and in large amounts, on developing in terms of size, wealth and quality. The nature of shopping centers as creations of commercialism is even more obvious, as commercialism inevitably breeds consumerism. Shopping centers are the temples of the latter, creating the lifestyle in which wanting, buying and having are the primary values. The developments of the urban architecture, the urban community and the shopping centers are closely connected, since all three shape one another in a way. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the interconnections between the shopping centers and the urban and, later on, the suburban population and to show how they have been affecting each other for over a hundred years.

The history of the shopping center as we know it today begins approximately in the 1920s. By that time, the turnover of the department stores which were located seemingly convincingly for both its owners and the customers in city centers began to decrease. Representatives of the middle class, who were the target customers of midscale and upscale department stores, had moved out of the city centers, as they could now afford buying houses in the cleaner, quieter and safer suburban areas. The middle-class husbands and fathers would now come to the city centers for work solely, and they did not have the time to go shopping during the week. The middle-class housewives who did not work had no reason to go to city centers at all. Of course, the neighborhoods they had moved out of did not remain empty for long, as new inhabitants moved in. However, since the downtown districts were not as prestigous as the suburbs, only those who could not afford better housing conditions moved in to the city centers. Those working class laborers and poor immigrants were obviously not interested in shopping for designer clothing and beauty products offered by the department stores, as they simply could not afford any of such goods. Therefore, the stores had to follow their customers and make their locations more convenient for the middle class shoppers. The 1920's saw the dawn of the car culture, when suburbian dwellers began to be almost addicted to their automobiles. Everyone needed to drive in order to get to work from the suburbs to the city center, and so the stores moved to the vicinity of large roads. Those "one-stop" clusters of stores offering a quite varied range of products, from groceries to clothing, were easier to approach for the middle class. The white collar employees could visit them on their way back from work and their whole families could go shopping at weekends, since the location was not that far from their suburban neighborhoods. The idea of locating the stores near main communication arteries proved to be a success; soon, the clusters of stores grew larger and larger, forming mile-long developments lining the highways. As more and more shoppers came, the store owners began to invest in larger parcels of land, so that their customers had somewhere to park their cars while they went shopping (by that time, many municipalities had forbidden

parking cars on curbs, since it resulted in less driving space and more dense traffic congestion). Buying such large areas of land meant costly expenditures, and sometimes single store owners could not afford it therefore, they began to form associations, or to sell their stores to the wealthier owners of largerer department stores, which usually formed the center for a gathering of stores in the area of those "miracle miles". Such centralized ownership was an important step on the way of forming the modern shopping centers, developments owned by a single wealthy enterpreneur or a consortium, who would lease their shopping spaces to particular store owners. Since the entire shopping area was owned by only one person or a group of people, they could decide about the architectural forms of the stores and about their tenants, who no longer could locate their stores randomly. This later resulted in coherent shopping centers, forming integrated architectural structures, designed to have a particular effect on the shoppers. Soon, however, the very reason which motivated store owners to locate their businesses near highways turned out to be the reason for their exile from there. The car culture was developing rapidly, more and more people owned automobiles, and soon traffic congestion was a major problem. Local authorities rebuilt the old highways, which connected the suburbs with the city center, into gigantic, six-lane freeways, from which it was difficult to access the nearby stores. Numerous bypassing routes were also constructed, which were located further from the shopping areas. Moreover, the customers grew tired of shopping in stores located near large streets, noisy, polluted and plain ugly. The shopping centers once again had to follow their customer's preferences they converted into regional shopping centers, located in the vicinity of the suburban neighborhoods or even in the very neighborhoods themselves rather than near the freeways. By 1950's the shopping centers had found a steady location. Building regional shopping areas in the suburbs provided the store owners with a permanent inflow of customers, and thus also money. However, the free market has its rights, and the pioneers of regional shopping centers soon had to face numerous competitors, who discovered the goldmine in the form of middle

class suburban shoppers. The new challenge for the shopping centers' owners was attracting more customers than their rivals. Therefore, they had to think of something else, apart from the offered products, that would make the shoppers come to their malls, and so the architecture, design and the entire "aura" of shopping edifices began to gain more significance than evere before. The owners discovered that their customers would come to their malls not only to shop for the items they had listed, but also to meet, talk, and spend some time together. In other words, regional shopping malls became venues for social life to be conducted, they began to shape the communities in the neighborhoods of which they were located. Not only retail stores, but also cafes and restaurants began to open inside the shopping centers, so that their visitors could come not only when they need to shop, but also whenever they wanted to spend their leisure time in some nice place. The "shoppers" became a community in itself. Their demands grew further, and the owners were eager to provide them with more attractions: bowling alleys, movie theaters, video arcades in the decades to follow. One more improvement was also introduced in the 1950's, namely the enclosure of the shopping center. Was it for purely practical reasons, to protect the shoppers from possible bad weather conditions, or whether the intention was to unify the architectural design of the centers the result of enclosing all of the boutiques, cafes and pedestrian alleys under one rooftop was the fact that now the separateness of the shopping mall from the rest of the world was also physical. The malls were now not only the communities, but, in a sense, there now was the possibility of creating new worlds within the interiors of the centers. Once the shoppers entered the enclosed area of the mall, they were moved to another realm, away from the traffic, from the streets, from their cars, from their jobs and problems they entered a different world, the creation of which had been in the hands of architects and designers, who were aware of the fact that the proper creation of a "shopping world" can have a particular effect on its visitors. Therefore, they started to design these worlds in such a way that the shoppers could forget themselves completely and lose themselves in the shopping fever.

Two dominating design themes can be noticed in shopping malls construction from the 1950's up until today the "rustic mall" and the "urban mall". Both of them simulate the real world in order to make their visitors feel comfortable, at home, at ease, and most importantly willing to spend their money. The rustic mall appeared a little earlier than the urban mall. The main idea behind it was to underplay the large size of the malls, which were now of enourmous sizes, including several department stores, not even mentioning other facilities. The designers did not want to scare the customers away with large, intimidating and uncozy blocks of commercial outlets, and so they attracted them with the inviting and friendly atmosphere of a country village the pedestrian areas were small and curvy, so the shoppers could not see the gigantic size of the mall immediately. The interior of a rural mall, paradoxically, imitates outdoor surroundings benches, flowing water streams and sculptures inevitably bring a park landscape to mind, so that the customers could feel that they are relaxing in natural surroundings. They can unwind, forget themselves, and get in the mood for shopping, which seems to them to be an accidental activity in such circumstances. The urban mall, on the other hand, tempts its visitors with a completely different aura. It is supposed to imitate the downtown yet another paradox in the mall architecture, as the very beginning of the shopping centers resulted from the store owners' chase after the customers which escaped the city centers. However, the "mall downtown" gives its visitors the city center in its utopian version, devoid of litter in the streets, gangsters, the homeless, pollution and noise. It offers the dazzling carnival atmosphere of neon lights, exciting city rush, variety of services and products offered in a milieu which is completely safe. Its large size is no longer masked, but rather highlighted as its advantage, so that the customers can admire the splendor of the "big city life". The urban mall designers went even further with their city-imitating idea, and so hotels, medical centers, offices and even housing apartments are now all a part of such a mall. As a matter of fact, the mall has become the city. One can work, eat and sleep in the mall, which thus becomes the real world.

Nowadays, the regional shopping malls in the United States are masterpieces of commercial architecture. Their function is no longer only the one of providing goods to the customers, but also to provide them with entertainment, food, and very often all the social life that they need. They have been designed to be more than just a place to shop; the mall is supposed to be "the experience". However, of course, the mall owners do not provide their customers with that experience as an act of charity, and so nearly every aspect of the design is a psychological move, supposed to make the visitors buy the offered products. Peter Gibian, in his essay entitled "The Art of Being Off-Center: Shopping Center Spaces and Spectacles" compares the "mall experience" to a love story in a motion picture the customer, charmed by the atmosphere, eventually falls in love with a piece of merchandise. People who come to the mall very often buy things impulsively, without having it planned. They come to the mall to meet their friends, to spend their free time in beautiful surroundings, to have a cup of coffee, and then, just by the way, they see something they like. All in all, they pay for the atmosphere of the place. However, the designer's purely commercial intentions resulted in something more, and the mall-goers became a community. It is very often the case that the shopping mall is actually the best or, sometimes, even the only place in the neighborhood were people can socialize during their leisure time. They now perform the functions of primary public spaces, attracting varied yet, to some extent, still chosen by the designers groups of people. Some come because they love to browse in things, teenagers come to hang out when they skip school, housewives come to meet their girlfriends over a cup of coffee, joggers come to exercise, as the mall alleys are safer than the real streets and there is no threat of being surprised by a sudden rainfall. A good example of a "mall-community" has been presented in Kevin Smith's 1995 movie "Mallrats", a seemingly careless comedy which, however, presents the community of people whose lives revolve around their regional mall. The most important events in the movies' protagonists' lives take place in the mall it is there where they fall in love, break up, meet their idols, find careers. They seem to waste their lives there in fact, some of them do but it is actually

the shopping mall which makes and creates their lives. Everybody from the community seems to either work or hang out in the mall. Some of the characters depict "ultimate mall-goers", who literally never leave the shopping mall, which replaces their entire world. The malls, which were originally designed as an illusion of reality, have become their reality. Although shopping malls have grown strongly into American landscape and culture, nowadays some predict their decline or even doom. The reason for this is the development of on-line shopping, the boom for which began in the late 1990's. The possibility of buying goods without having to leave home and browsing through hundreds of items you do not really need seems alluring to many present-day mall goers, who might decide to enter virtual stores rather than the real ones. But is it really possible for the regional shopping malls to give in to the on-line stores? "E-tailing", as opposed to retailing, seems to have all the advantages it is fast and convenient, often cheaper, as the sellers do not have to pay rents for physical locations and salaries to clerks. The success of on-line stores, such as Amazon.com, seems to forecast the fall of the malls. On the other hand, there is one extremely important advantage of bricks-and-mortar shopping malls over on-line stores, namely their social function. Internet shopping is practical, and practical only, whereas "real" shopping is a psychological and sociological experience. Human interaction, the event of going out and socializing is often more pleasurable and gratifying than the simple pleasure of making a purchase. Furthermore, shopping centers provide their visitors with "shoptainment", when shopping becomes secondary to other attractions that one may enjoy in the mall. Buying without leaving one's home does not satisfy the shoppers' psychological needs. The mall indeed shapes, or at least is the venue for shaping, people's social identities. The dwellers of suburbs are driven to the regional malls by their herd instinct; since they live in houses relatively separated from one another, mostly in small families, far from the busy and crowded city centers, they often feel alone, which naturally is neither normal nor healthy for a human being. And, as it was already stated in this paper, the mall is very often the only convenient place for people to gather.

Sometimes, shopping is only an excuse to blend in with the crowd and fight against one's own loneliness. To conclude, regional shopping centers were not only shaped by the needs and desires of middle class, suburban shoppers they have also grown to become the agents of shaping those shoppers' identities. Shopping malls, which were originally bred by commercialism and designed for the simple purpose of selling goods and making money, turned out to be something more for local communities. The "shoppers" form a community, since the mall is often the only place in their neighborhood where they can meet and socialize comfortably, since it offers all the attraction, that an entire little town could offer but under one rooftop. Shopping malls have established their position in the map of the cultural life of suburban America, and even the most cutting-edge developments in modern technology in the form of, for example, on-line shopping are not likely to change it. After all, participating in the life of the community and socializing with other people are some of the basic human needs; the kind of needs that the experience provided by the shopping mall can satisfy.

Bibliography:

1. Gibian, Peter. "The Art of Being Off-Center: Shopping Center Spaces and Spectacles". Maasik, Sonia and Solomon, Jack. Signs of Life: Readings of Popular Culture fro Writers. Boston, St. Martin's Press, 1994. 2. Gruen, Victor. The Heart of Our Cities. New York, Simon and Schuster Inc., 1964. Pp. 186-191. 3. Dodge, Martin. "Geographies of E-Commerce: The Case of Amazon.com". Graham, Stephen. The Cybercities Reader. London, Routledge, 2004. 4. Zulin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Chapter 6: "While the city shops". Massachusets, Blackwell Publ., 1995. 5. Smith, Kevin, dir. .Mallrats. Perf. Jason Lee, Ben Affleck, Shannon Doherty. Written by: Smith, Kevin. Gramercy Pictures, 1995.