By Sofia Samatar
“The Friendly City” is a weekly column about walking in Harrisonburg that will run during 2024. Each week, your friendly correspondent, writer and teacher Sofia Samatar, will reflect on a walk in our city.
Admittedly, it was an odd decision to walk to the mall. Malls were not made to fit a walker’s routine. These massive, enclosed shopping centers arose in the 1950s, part of a shift that included the growth of the suburbs and automobile culture. Malls are often blamed for the decay of American city centers, because their superstores and movie theaters drew people away from local downtown venues, encouraging residents to discard a walk to the corner store in favor of a drive to the mall.
My walk to the mall takes me down Evelyn Byrd Avenue to University Boulevard, where I’m stranded without a sidewalk, a sure sign that the needs of pedestrians have been left out of this urban plan. Feeling a bit like an unwanted pest—some random racoon or possum calculating its best chances of survival in a world of asphalt—I scramble up a slope covered with woodchips toward the comparative safety of a parking lot. The day is cold and bright, the sky an expanse of wintry blue. The vast, peach-yellow citadel of the mall rises against the ridge, and I make my way toward it with the awkward, clownish maneuvers of a walker in an area designed for cars, constantly at odds with my surroundings, jumping down curbs, dashing across driveways, and barging between the shrubs of landscaped barriers.
In his 1992 book, written during the heyday of shopping malls, the anthropologist Marc Augé analyzes what he calls non-places: modern forms like highways, department stores, and airport lounges that defy the usual methods of anthropology. Traditionally, Augé observes, anthropologists study small, distinctive spaces: villages and rural communities with dense layers of history and culture. How should an anthropologist take on an anonymous space like this parking lot I’m hurrying through, ducking my head against the wind, or the bland, windowless edifice of the mall, decked with signs for big stores and company logos, that might be part of any landscape, anywhere?
According to Augé, an anthropologist of non-places must address the world created there, which is solitary and contractual. These are zones of transit rather than dwelling, of retail rather than social exchange, of convenience rather than experience. Identity is flattened; in a mall we are all the same, listening to the same background music, guided by the same instructions (“No Smoking,” “Place your items in the bagging area”). Entering the mall, with its self-effacing gray floor tile and understated, anodyne lighting, I’m reminded of childhood, of passing through the doors of a mall in another part of the country and a distant time, which despite these differences was exactly like this mall, inducing the same feeling—pallid, sweetly insipid, and vaguely stifling—of stepping into a giant marshmallow.
It’s strange that our landscape is arranged to discourage walking to the mall, since once you get there, all you do is walk. Up and down the halls I go, passing the lighted windows, the shoe displays, the mannikins gazing into the distance. I remember that on days like this, when the temperature dropped toward freezing, my father would drive to our local mall to walk for exercise, circling the place in his sneakers along with many other middle-aged people for whom this seemed to be a trend at the time. Originally, the word mall meant a public place for walking. Victor Gruen, the architect of the postwar mall, envisioned a utopian, pedestrian-friendly space, with housing, schools, and parks as well as shops. When he visited the malls that were actually built from his designs—chunks of stores surrounded by what he called “the ugliness and discomfort of the land-wasting seas of parking”—he was horrified. His imagined place had become a non-place. One of the only bits of his dream to survive, I reflect as I wander through the “gigantic shopping machine” he deplored, is the act of walking.
It’s strange that a non-place should inspire feelings of attachment. Personally, I’m with Victor Gruen: I don’t love malls. Roaming these colorless corridors, I feel like an old-fashioned anthropologist, desperate for signs of a particular human culture, gasping for something that isn’t standardized, neutrally packaged, and routine. But malls are embedded in culture, and in our collective fantasy life. They form the backdrop of beloved films and TV shows, many of them with a Christmas theme, I recall as I pass beneath the gargantuan tree with its regular pattern of fake snow and dim bronze balls. For Augé, non-places create “neither singular identity nor relations; only solitude and similitude.” But isn’t there a particular energy to the link between the mall and the holiday season, something that exceeds monetary transactions and becomes a cultural mood? Isn’t nostalgia relational? I think of an online conversation I read recently, full of reminiscences about the Friendly City, in which people enthuse over the old mall, the food court, and the candy store. For one contributor, the uniformity of malls across the country is a comforting reminder of the past. “Yes,” another exclaims, “I love that every mall feels the same! I think it’s the smell.”
It’s strange, too, that a mall should be haunting. One would expect a non-place to be too sterile and devoid of human interest to raise a ghost. But there’s an unmistakable melancholy to the mall, a tinge of abandonment and encroaching decay. Under a series of blows—economic recession, the rise of online shopping, the pandemic—American malls have begun to collapse, many shutting down altogether in what some have called a retail apocalypse. Our mall shows signs of this general decline. Closed stores with dark, gridded windows exude a mournful air. Instead of a variety of ads for different products, one sees a repeated sign: Leasing Now. “Get creative,” beg the posters on the deserted booths down the center of the walkway, with a poignant attempt at positive thinking. “We have the space.”
And the cardboard figures standing outside one of the shuttered businesses, portraying a larger-than-life gingerbread village—how sad they are, in their gaudy colors, beaming good cheer toward the empty hall, the children smiling gamely beside their king-sized dog! Surely these decorations express the essence of the mall: extravagantly big, with a cookie-cutter lack of individuality, associated with childhood and the explosive consumerism of the American holiday season, looking sweet enough to make your mouth water, but finally inedible, and shadowed by the economically depressed gloom of a dead store. Then again, considering some of the proposed plans and actual projects to repurpose fading American malls, transforming them into mixed-use neighborhoods from the visions of Victor Gruen, it’s just possible that this faux-gingerbread town foreshadows, like a figure in a dream, the next life of this non-place: a future place where the sun will shine, fresh air blow, real kids play, and living people walk their warm and breathing dogs.
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