Cyclical Malls?

Here we see another step up the evolution ladder of the mall; the drive-in shopping center. There are two keys aspects of this that I find especially interesting.

One of the first that I found most intriguing was, I believe, a rather positive thing. For the first time, this drive in model speaks not of competitiveness or one single “department” store dominating the other stores, but rather of collaboration. In Emile Zola’s novel we read of how angry other stores were because of the department store essentially stealing business and trying to sell everything, whereas, here will really see this idea of a “shopping center as being an area where one can go to find one “specialized product” that they like and then while there, finding other things they may need, or even want. This goes back to a comment that I posted quite some time ago, stating essentially that “Life was always about communal living and working where you lived, and things such as the city, the arcade, the eventual development of the mall, and even the industrial revolution all really changed the way that relationship worked” Well, now I find myself retracting some of that statement. Yes, life was more communal long ago, but the part I retract is that the mall itself may not really have been a part of that destruction. In some ways, I now realize that the mall actually encourages a sense of community. The way Longstreth spins the “communal” aspect of the “shopping center” makes me rethink the community aspect. He once said that places such as these first drive-in shopping centers were no longer about co-existence, but rather collaboration. They now wished to advertise as one unit or by advertising individual products they would be bringing in people who may find they need another product sold by a different retailer. “Operation expenses were shared, pricing policies coordinated, uniform hours kept, and identity consolidated” (Longstreth 41) They wanted to “minimize the distinction between stores” but rather truly build a shopping community. Longstreth even said that these shopping drive-ins were “little more than basic shelter” essentially saying that it wasn’t even about the structure or the design, it was about unification and accessibility to the new vehicle-driving-pedestrians.

As a second point of interest, I would like to pose a question. Does the evolution of “commerce” or commercial space evolve in a cyclical fashion? To explain this I bring forth the idea that this reading is acting as a stepping stone toward “the megamall” but I am wondering if it isn’t part of something else. We have two images from Longstreth next to two images of Fayetteville Towne Center. The left of the Longstreth’s is just hypothetical, as if the parking were removed and then the Longstreth image with the parking. Somehow we developed from centralized parking in an outdoor space with stores surrounding to the enclosed mall idea on the left of those two images with miles of parking surrounding it, right? Yet in the Fayetteville model, we see an enclosed mall reverting back to the parking space surrounded by stores. Why is this reversion happening? Are we going backward? Did this mall revert back for survival only, and if it worked, then why are we still building malls? Is DestinyUSA nothing more than carousel reverting from an enclosed mall to an open shopping center, merely masked by an absurdly large glass canopy?