Over the last generation, it became something of a trend to hate the mall.
“I think it's come to symbolize everything people think about as having gone wrong in America,” said Elizabeth Dyer. “Suburban sprawl, consumer excess, really bad taste. I think it was seen as tacky and soulless and just really removed from any living urban fabric, that is.”
Dyer is a psychotherapist and writer, and she told The Show that she knows that hating the mall has become almost a moral position in recent years.
But, in a new piece for Next City, she argues that in a climate change future, maybe we should look at the mall in a new way: as bunkers.
Full conversation
ELIZABETH DYER: Across the country, malls are sort of quietly doubling as cooling centers during heat waves and smoke shelters during wildfires. And when I visited one recently with my young kids who are 4 and 7, I really started thinking, whoa, this is a place that I could go when the next wildfire hits here in the Bay Area.
Because it’s sort of like a climate bunker hiding in plain sight. I think it’s sort of performing the collective protective role almost that public infrastructure no longer is really providing reliably.
LAUREN GILGER: That’s so interesting. So there’s a climate future kind of aspect to this, where literally you call them like they could be bunkers. And I think people have used them that way. Californians were told to go to malls during some of the worst wildfires, right?
I mean, is this something you think is already kind of happening, even though no one’s really calling it this?
DYER: So according to my research, it’s pretty informal, but just from observation and also from having published this piece and getting so many responses from friends and people I didn’t even know who talked about going to the mall in times of climate strife and emergency. I do think it is something that’s happening. I think it’s a phenomenon that is happening.
GILGER: OK, so there’s that part of it, the climate part of it. But what you’re also getting at here, I think is very interesting, which is sort of a defense of the mall as a third space, a place of togetherness in a world in which we’re all very siloed and often don’t even ever to be in the same place at the same time, because you can order your groceries and have them delivered, you can order your clothes and have them delivered. Like those places where we’re all actually in public are becoming fewer and far between.
DYER: Yes, that really is sort of the heart of the piece for me. It’s both about the mall as this really surprising refuge from climate change, but also a refuge from sort of the worst new wave of neoliberal optimization. The mall’s refuge isn’t only physical. I think it really is this kind of third space.
It sort of resists the optimization that we have become so accustomed to when we act as consumers online, where we’re really routed and measured and funneled with really a scary amount of cold logic behind it. The mall is just this hapless Claire’s-fitted space with a dinky little fountain and kids throwing pennies in.
Still, it feels very innocent and very different from the digital experiences of consumerism that I think we’ve become accustomed to.
GILGER: Yeah. You write about your own kind of childhood experiences at the mall. I had a very similar experience where it was like the place where I could pretend to be a grownup almost. Tell us about what this was like in your memory, at least at malls.
DYER: Yeah, it’s such a crisp memory, and I love that it’s one that so many of us share. I definitely remember as a kid being dropped off, you know, at the Georgia Square Mall outside of my hometown in Athens, Georgia, was outside the perimeter. And it was like a little adult playground where I got to pretend at having money and buying food for myself and meeting up with friends and running into friends and getting my ears pierced and buying silly trinkets.
But it really did feel like a space where I could bop around. And yes, it was as a consumer. And I think that is where we’ve been really hung up in the critique in the past. And it’s a reasonable critique. Why is it that the spaces that we have for young people that feel sort of safe and enclosed are spaces for consumerism?
But at this point, when consumerism is part of everything we do, it’s part of our leisure time, it’s part of how kids socialize. It’s built into the apps we use. I think that it actually starts to look like a break from that.
GILGER: In a kind of ironic way, yeah. I mean, if you’re talking about the mall being a place of safety and refuge, though, we have to talk about the fact that that’s probably not true for everyone. And in Phoenix in particular, the most successful malls that still stand and are still popular are kind of the very high-end ones and have been getting more and more high end, it seems.
DYER: Yeah, I did a little research and you’re exactly right. It is the high-end malls. That are continuing to do well. And of course, everyone has experienced the mall differently, and safety there has always been unevenly distributed. Black and brown teenagers have long been shadowed by security, and queer and trans kids have been policed for how they dress.
People who have seemed out of place — unhoused, disabled, poor people — were often pushed out in the name of comfort or the shopkeepers needing to make a profit. So the mall, even when it sold itself more successfully as a public square to my generation, it was always privately owned and with all the exclusions that come with that. And then the thought about how it seems to be these more elite spaces that are the ones that are continuing on, I think that’s a really important one.
Yeah, what would it mean if these de facto bunkers were also policed in terms of who could come inside? But I do know that it’s better than a billionaire’s private bunker, which is also what’s being constructed right now. And I think there’s also something about this idea that it’s the people who sort of are able to sneer at the mall and to move on from it and to look for it in these new incarnations that look like downtown or that look like something different. These are the people with options.
And I think what I really remember about the mall and what I observed in my recent visit with my family was that it really is a great place to go when you have nowhere else to go. You know, I was there with my 80-year-old father-in-law and my little kids, and we were all just taken care of for hours.
I mean, there were bathrooms, there were water fountains, there was a food court. It was really low key. My nervous system at no point sounded the alarm, which is, you know, rare when I take my multigenerational family out shopping. It was surprising to me. And the level of accessibility for people who are mobility impaired, for kids who have no common sense about looking both ways before they cross a busy street. I mean, that just felt really different to me in a mall.
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