Wayfinding media and neutralizing control at the shopping mall

Abstract

To fill out critiques of the American shopping mall with historical specificity, this article examines wayfinding media and provides a glimpse of retail spatial designs, which organized movement in shopping malls and were integrated into maps, directories, and the architecture of the mall itself. This particular focus stresses how wayfinding at shopping malls discloses the mall as a multimedia structure, which communicated a sense of shopping experience characterized by perceptions of freedom, spontaneity, and unspecified path-making. These observations are supported with examples from mall maps and retailing literature regarding wayfinding print media in retail space and the integration of wayfinding strategies into architectural design schemes. Taken together, details about these discourses bear a resemblance to the concept of a “democratic surround,” which, as Fred Turner explains, describes a multimedia production of space aimed at neutralizing the controlling aspects of commercial spaces in the 1960s and 70s and arranged to promote positive connotations between citizenship and consumption. Having shown how the shopping mall plays its own role in this cultural development, particularly with regard to the wayfinding media found there, the article concludes by arguing for the continued study of malls in light of their rapid disappearance from the American landscape.

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