You may not be surprised to learn that 2020 has been a bad year for grocery stores. It is expected that 25,000 outlets will also be able to close this year due to the pandemic. By the end of next year, chances are it will. more than part of the point-of-sale branches that anchor trade in US malls. America will disappear, it’s underway.
It’s tempting to mourn with nostalgia the death of grocery stores, for those of us who grew up in the suburbs, grocery stores are where we’ve become adults, where we first met Santa, went on dates. , met employees and committed misdemeanors. DeadMalls. com’s online page fondly documents the ruins of old grocery malls, with many visitors showing souvenirs and photographs of places where they once bought or worked. This nostalgia is especially acute at a time when the sight of crowds of satisfied rs without mask wandering through poorly ventilated corridors gives the impression that it belongs to a lost golden age. However, the convulsive history of the American mall reminds us that even those who celebrate his death deserve to be cautious as well. what could update them.
If you can take credit for inventing the mall, it’s Victor Gruen, a Viennese socialist architect who fled Nazi-controlled Austria in 1938. Gruen moved to Los Angeles and temporarily began to think about how his fondness for make top-down plans and look cool. Public spaces can be grafted into the sprawling suburban landscape of Southern California. In 1943, Gruen and his wife, Elsie Krummeck, co-wrote an essay for the Architectural Forum in which they proposed a new kind of space: a completely enclosed landscape and a pedestrian grocery shopping center that would scatter shops, art installations, halls. concerts and meeting spaces online. This new urban form, they hoped, would restrict the chaos and urban sprawl of the suburbs, filling other people’s lives with art and music. and ordering a flexible expanding market for customer goods. By the mid-1950s, Gruen’s vision had materialized at the Northland Center in the Detroit suburbs and at the Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota. from developers.
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Within a few years, the purchase of shopping malls, as well as federally funded roads, well-maintained work parks, and affordable housing, have become components of U. S. suburban infrastructure. In the most common neighborhoods of whites he silently oversaw the de facto segregation of advertising spaces. At the same time, grocery malls have helped codify the patriarchal geography of American suburbs. Truen imagined that grocery malls would be chosen cities reserved for women and young people: spaces where those teams can simply enjoy the richness of urban life while their husbands worked downtown. They were also spaces where women not only bought, but also worked, in non-unionized and low-wage retail jobs.
Since the 1970s, shopping malls have spread across the surface of the earth like fungi after a storm. In the current decade of the 21st century, there were more than 500 shopping malls in Brazil, 600 in India and 4,000 in China. Hundreds of thousands of acres of urban land on each and every inhabited continent in the world are enclosed, heated and illuminated through foreign criteria with profound negative consequences for the world. preservation of the public area and climate change mitigation.
Gruen helped create a world from which there was no escape. In 1968, depressed by the fact that his creations had exacerbated that cured the alienation and inequality of American suburban life, Gruen returned to Europe. There, with an almost dizzying irony, he learned, that his home at the time of the training years had been demolished to make way for a shopping mall.
Still, the temptation to mourn the purchase of groceries in shopping malls is sharpened as soon as it replaces them. As COVID-19 tears apart America’s social fabric, groceries are increasingly dissociating from urban space. Since the beginning of the year, Amazon has hired more than a hundred thousand new employees to distribute products through warehouses and postal networks, adding between $73 billion and $113 billion to Jeff Bezos’ fortune. More than a million Instacart buyers have mobilized to act as human barriers between rich suburbs and deadly diseases Wealth and race inequality is growing In the rapidly becoming coronavirus economy, service personnel are being relegated from buying supermarkets and retail stores to windowless distribution centers, while thriving consumers remain at home. to the suburbs.
Although still early, the city after COVID-19 is likely to be an intensification of the built, isolated, racially segregated and carbon-intensive surroundings that emerged in the suburbs of postwar American cities. dying, but more than ever, we still live in the world that they helped create.
Sam Wetherell is the Foundations: How the Built Environment Made Twentieth-Century Britain, now available at Princeton University Press.