late wrote:Nietzsche watched the Modern world being born. While religion played a large role with previous generations, partly what Nietzsche was doing was talking about what he was seeing. Where the community was once literally organised around religion, the center of town became the market, and the organising force was business.
I remember back in the 80's when the mall was , in addition to being the commercial center, the social hub of the community. In the center court there were events, such as puppet shows, and talent shows, for example. And during the Holiday Season, there would even be, not only a Santa's village, but also a Christmas cantata , put on by a church choir. As this article points out, the social life of youth especially revolved around the mall.
When I was a teen in the 1980s, the shopping mall was the center of social life. It was a regular gathering place for people my age; it was one of the few places to go that was free (unless you decided to buy something), parents generally felt like it was safe, and we might see other kids our age there. Remember, there was no email, no Internet, and no social media, so aside from the telephone, hanging out was the only way to socialize.
Malls were also a site of aspirational consumption. While I could occasionally buy clothes, records (on vinyl or cassette), food, or other goods, mostly the mall was the place of imagination of what I would buy if I could. My friends and I could try on clothes to see what styles were flattering for occasions we might someday need an outfit for. This was not just a way to pass the time, but to bond with friends. Memorialized in movies like Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Valley Girl (1983), and Mall Rats (1995) to name a few, malls were center stage for middle-class American teens living in the suburbs.
Malls and other local retailers often provided teens with their first jobs. As I blogged about in 2016, in the late 1980s the employment rate among sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds rate was about 60 percent. Afterschool and summer jobs were much more readily available; one of my first jobs was at a children’s clothing store in our local mall. Not only was it a chance to earn some money, but the job provided another opportunity to spend time at this social hub. https://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/2018/08/shopping-malls-and-social-change.html
Such had been the nature of community relations under capitalism. In an interesting irony though, the man who was most responsible for designing shopping malls was himself a socialist.
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.
By the 1960s, Gruen was horrified by his creations. The shopping mall, along with the freeway and the cheap federally backed mortgage, had become part of the architecture of suburban white supremacy. Gruen returned to Austria in 1968 and furiously worked on a project to pedestrianize Vienna.
Two years before his death in 1980, he stated, “I am often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.” https://jacobin.com/2014/04/the-last-shopping-mall
The character of an institution is determined by its social environment . A mall existing within the context of capitalism would be different from a mall , such as the
GUM , functioning upon a socialist basis, or even for that matter fascism, as typified by Disney's
Epcot , for example .
Gruen’s ideas nonetheless attracted one devoted fan who had the financial resources to put them into action: Walt Disney. The 1955 launch of Disneyland was a staggering success, but the triumph of the planned environment inside the park created a kind of opposing reaction in the acres outside, which were swiftly converted from orange groves into cheap motels, gas stations and billboards. Disney grew increasingly repulsed by the blight and so he began plotting to construct a second-generation project where he could control the whole environment, not just the theme park but the entire community around it.
Disney planned to design an entire functioning city from scratch, one that would reinvent almost every single element of the modern urban experience. He dubbed it EPCOT, short for Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow. While the Disney Corporation would eventually build a future-themed amusement park named EPCOT, it had nothing to do with Disney’s vision, which would have been a true community with full-time residents, not another tourist attraction.
During his exploratory research, Disney fell under the spell of Gruen. Gruen had included kind words about Disneyland in his book The Heart of Our Cities and he shared Disney’s contempt for the sprawling “avenues of horror” that had proliferated around the theme park. And so when Disney decided to buy a vast swath of swampland in central Florida and build a “Progress City” — as he called it — Gruen was the perfect patron saint for the project. Like Gruen’s original plan for Southdale, it was going to be an entire community oriented around a mall. https://ideas.ted.com/the-strange-surprisingly-radical-roots-of-the-shopping-mall/
The pet project EPCOT was not the theme park we know today, but an unfinished city of the future not unlike the fascist model of government employed by Nazi Germany. A place where slums wouldn’t be allowed to develop, it would include a prototype municipality, an airport, an industrial park. But the plan didn’t stop there. It went on and on. Disney’s vision was to cultivate a “community of the future designed to stimulate American corporations to come up with new ideas for urban living.”
It was to be a place where unions would be prohibited, democracy non-existent, and social security merely a laughable notion. The concept is now gaining tangible influence in privately gated communities guarded by their own security forces. Walt Disney himself said about the project, “There will be no landowners and therefore no voting control. People will rent houses instead of buying them, and at modest rentals. There will be no retirees; everyone must be employed.”
This demand for loyal labor is disturbingly similar to the governments of Mussolini’s Italy and Nazi Germany. Fascist states of the 1930s and 40s utilized this communal approach to nationalizing land, resources, and labor to benefit the nation-state as well as the despots who controlled them rather than the citizens. Or they would benefit certain citizens over others. These practices created anti-democratic police states and societies in which the people were expected to labor diligently and give back to the state institution. Instead of using National Socialism, Disney wanted to utilize his prominent and unregulated role in bloated American capitalism to gain more power over land and people. https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/walt-disney/walt-the-quasi-nazi-the-fascist-history-of-disney/
The future of malls therefore depends upon the path in which society at large develops. Will democratic socialism of some kind arise, or will it be that in the words of the Marilyn Manson song,
"The Beautiful People" , " Capitalism has made it this way
Old-fashioned fascism will take it away." And as it stands currently, in terms of the prevailing
cultural hegemony , organized religion has prevailed over mere
Mammon , as churches have come to take residence with malls.
As the retail apocalypse sweeps the US, hundreds of malls are being deserted. But a blessed few are being transformed into something entirely different.
Empty and out-of-use malls are being revamped as fitness centers, offices, public libraries, movie theaters, medical clinics, and even churches.
"Only so many consumers are going to malls, and they will flock to newer ones," June Williamson, a City College of New York architecture professor and the author of "Retrofitting Suburbia," told Business Insider. "If developers build a new mall, they are inevitably undercutting another property. So older properties have to get re-positioned every decade, or they will die."
Worshipping at a mall might sound strange but it's a reality that thousands of people across the US are living. https://www.businessinsider.com/dying-malls-are-being-transformed-into-churches-2017-6
Within modern bourgeois society, the commercial and the spiritual has come to be intertwined, in a dialectical relationship. And since both religion and business exerts considerable influence upon the political system, this also helps to explain the so called culture war. It all has to do with the over all before mentioned cultural hegemony .
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