The 'Magic of the Mall': An Analysis of Form, Function, and Meaning in the Contemporary Retail Built Environment

Abstract

Shopping is the second most important leisure activity in North America, and although watching television is indisputably the first, much of its programming actually promotes shopping, both through advertising and the depiction of model consumer lifestyles. This chapter argues that developers have sought to assuage this collective guilt over conspicuous consumption by designing into the retail built environment the means for a fantasized dissociation from the act of shopping. It considers the contemporary cultural context and the connection between the techniques of environmental design and image making in (post)modern society. The chapter examines the retail built environment as an object of value; that is, a private, instrumental space designed for the efficient circulation of commodities which is itself a commodity produced for profit. It discusses the means by which developers have obscured this logic by constructing shopping centers as idealized representations of past or distant public spaces.

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