dead malls: suburban activism, local spaces, global logistics pdf

This neglected area of study signals the potential for a vast range of exploratory ethnographic revisionings of public space and spatial practices in surprising places.Abstract: The recent flurry of research about arts-led regeneration initiatives illuminates how contemporary arts festivals can become complicit in the production of urban inequality. However, Morningside reveals the need to consider spatial practice beyond our preconceived notions of what goes on in spaces designed for private use. We argue that many malls have effectively become community space, and activism to prevent its loss can be understood as a form of anti-globalization practice, even if it never employs that language. Morningside Mall is a prime illustration of the conflict inherent in privatized public spaces - that despite collective voice and action the ‘public’ still had no impact on the fate of ‘their’ space. Taking the case of the Morningside Mall in an old suburb of Toronto, we investigate the informal claims made on mall space through everyday spatial practice and the explicit claims for community space that arise when that space is threatened. In this article we investigate the revolution in logistics that has provoked the phenomenon of ‘dead malls’ and the creative activism emerging that aims to protect mall space as ‘community space’. This is particularly true in declining inner suburbs, where poor and racialized communities depend more heavily on malls for social reproduction as well as recreation and consumption. Spatial practice often exceeds the conceptions of designers and managers, transforming malls into community space. Much of the disjuncture between popular outcry and academic silence relates to conceptions of ‘public’ space, and specifically the gap between formal ownership and everyday spatial practice. But despite popular concern for the demise of mall space, critical urban scholarship has largely sidelined the phenomenon. ‘Dead malls’ are now a staple of North American (sub)urban landscapes, and have provoked local activism in many places. As retail logistics globalizes and big-box power centres replace enclosed shopping malls from the postwar era, a distinct form of social infrastructure vanishes as well. An entire category of urban space, albeit hardly recognized as such, is disappearing across North America.

Dead malls: suburban activism, local spaces, global logistics pdf