A MALICIOUS MAULING

by Fran Speed

"Shopping Malls, Disneyland and television are all examples of the new stage of hyper reality - the falseness that is better than reality. Reality always has its detrimental aspects like crime, homeless people, dirt. In a situation like hyper reality, like a shopping mall, everything is reduced to a set of agreed upon themes, so people feel more comfortable here than in a real situation. The accurate urban reality is replaced by the falsehood of the shopping mall"

Margaret Crawford, architectural historian.

"The Glades" shopping mall, its interior a glitzy mishmash of dubious styles with its unremarkable lego-like exterior as Bromley's answer to the ubiquitous shopping developments that have been spawned up and down the Country is something I opposed along with many other residents a few years ago; many local people still regard it as a kitsch monstrosity that caused the obliteration of a whole urban community. The residents didn't have much of a say in the matter. Over the preceding two years the council had quietly and cleverly bought up half of the properties on the Glades proposed site. The same council then rezoned the area and made a killing. The argument however is now long dead, we have it and we're stuck with it.

But as a microcosm of current economic and social thinking the Glades says a lot about the kind of government that spawned it here in Bromley. The Glades and malls like it are about the insidious privatisation of our living space. As consumption ghettos, they are about unelected and unaccountable business corporations dictating the opening and closing times of great chunks of our towns and cities. They dictated how and when we shop and the criteria for these decisions are based on purely commercial interests. These substantial areas of once publicly owned land are effectively controlled not by the locally elected council but solely by the mall owners, whose motives have everything to do with profit and nothing to do with local needs and interests. Even the security personnel that patrol them (there are now apparently more security personnel than police officers in the U.K) are accountable ultimately to their private employers and not the local community.

Much of this development has been driven by speculative investment on the part of funding institutions, or local authorities seeking a short term capital gain. Bromley is no exception. In effect the town's centre, our high street has been sold and relocated in the Glades where it can be managed for maximum exploitation value, by a management who are more interested in our money than our kinship.

The Glades development like similar developments are insidious interlopers. Malls make money because they can be managed and controlled down to their plastic atmospheres and piped music. The motorist invariably has to pay to park and the cost of numerous security personnel employed to protect its interests are borne by the hapless shopper in the form of inflated prices; the earnings from the jobs created boost higher GNP statistics, but in reality all the mall has done is employ a lot of non-producers, parasitic economics in every sense of the word.

As a magnet for consumption, at peak times, the Glades attracts more consumers on wheels than Bromley can justifiably support in terms of pollution and accommodation. The overflow and burden is carried by the adjacent roads. Frequently as a consequence many residents have been forced to destroy front gardens to accommodate their own vehicles for want of parking space.

As completely controlled, hermetically sealed spaces, they appear on the surface at least to the average consumer, to offer warm comfortable almost unrealistically flattering and elaborate environments. But appearances can be deceptive. Shopping malls are also sites of carefully thought out, not so benevolent experiments in social engineering; design led environments with the main purpose of making people spend more money and buy more goods.

Perhaps more sinister, in their most contemporary U.S. form are the themed fantasy mega centres, mimicked by developers like John Hall in Britain. These shopping centres go beyond mere retailing tools and become almost new forms of social control and segregation, a means of designing out all those negative features of our society such as poverty, urban decay and social protest, replacing them with a sanitised, comforting and pacified environment. It's not insignificant that NASA has used the model of the shopping mall in researching the shape and form of tomorrow's totally enclosed self sufficient space stations.

Malls are now termed "the new enclosures". At night the centre is locked. What was a huge expanse of public land is suddenly out of bounds to local people. What people thought of as a public space suddenly becomes private property. And yet the influence of these private institutions is nothing short of the most insidious kind of social engineering.

As a consequence of this blatant social engineering developers have all but eliminated any other types of shopping. Street markets, local shops and services have been squeezed out by the multinationals and the mega stores that dominate them. The rich cacophony of the street, the vernacular style of building influenced by the physical, social and cultural mores of an area are pushed out in favour of "purchase inducing" music and the sugar coated carrot of "leisure facilities".

"The message of the mall is clear; spiritual man is dead, material man is king. Do not walk on the grass - it is ornamental. Do not touch the plants - they are alarmed. And do not loiter. You're here to spend money and we're here to make it." Interestingly the motives for the first shopping centres even in the USA were not exclusively commercial. The architect Victor Gruen commonly regarded as "the father of the mall" has said that initially the first malls were a response to the social and communal problems of suburban spread. He saw shopping centres as offering a focus for public and social life and as an attempt to deal with the problem of the motor car in a designed way. It was hoped that the shopping centre would grow into an urban centre and that as a consequence public and social facilities would develop out of its core. But he admits that it never happened; instead they became dictated totally by commercial criterion. Shopping malls have killed city and town centres as meaningful "civic spaces". After 6pm they become meaningless, wasteful and barren places, with the resultant privatisation of our cultural life. The retail revolution has reduced them to one overriding purpose... shopping.

The physical separation of a community's commercial life from its social, cultural and political activities helps to explain what has gone wrong with many of our town and city centres. European towns and cities have experienced the same kind of changes but there are fundamental differences between us.

Independent retailers abroad have relatively greater strength and although equally vulnerable with declining trades, they continue to add greater variety and intrinsic interest to the continental high street. Other differences also have effect. In France the shopkeeper probably owns the freehold building and is more likely to live with his family above the shop on the first floor, while probably letting the upper storeys to other residents. As a result, towns are lively places twenty four hours a day. Life does not come to a complete standstill when the shops close. Eating habits, lunch breaks are treated with more sense of occasion and integrates the community as a result. And because people live in the centre of their towns, giving them a sense of meaning and value there is less graffiti, vandalism or petty crime.

By contrast in Britain local and independent traders have already been squeezed out of the high street by the sheer weight of multiple domination. They have been simply unable to compete for either prime sites or customers. The loss of independent trade developed over centuries, out of the very texture of the original settlement means the inevitable loss of diversity which provides the inherent uniqueness of places physically and culturally. As a consequence people lose their sense of identity; their sense of being rooted in a place. They lose their sense of connection to the very environment that has to support them physically and emotionally.

Apart from the alienation that many people feel and for all this state of the art shopping many senior citizens and mothers with young children, still can't buy a loaf of bread, get to a school, a community centre or health centre without the aid of a car, a cab or a bus. Robbed of local trade in their neighbourhoods, other trades and services die as the community seems to wither and dwindle.

Towns are about life as we have traditionally known it. Green economics is about accessibility over mobility, about putting people before profit, about encouraging real local investment, about producing local products and services for local needs, in short it's about genuine local democracy. The Glades is Alice in Wonderland economics down to its tacky Disney style attractions. The multinational corporations reign supreme and allow government to believe it governs. As a reflection of current government policy whether at national or local level, the Glades just about says it all.

But we are all both perpetrator and victim of the retail culture. The real problem lies in the sheer helpless consumerism of people who it seems will find any distraction, be it free parking or the odd attraction to go shopping. The sight is all too common. Laden with unessential tut, they leave the retail parks and shopping centres, bewildered only by their capacity to overspend. At a V&A exhibition on architecture I heard Sir Hugh Casson say that the philosophical adage "I think therefore I am" has now become "I shop therefore I am".

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