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Humanities professors weigh in on culture of shopping malls

By Nancy J. Ashmore
July 2, 2002

Chances are excellent that you and your family will visit at least one of them this summer, especially if the weather is muggy and buggy. They're everywhere, after all, "even Cuba," according to two St. Olaf College professors (Eric Nelson in English and Jim Farrell in history and American studies) who have each written a book on the subject.

"They" are malls, and two of the most historic ones (Southdale Shopping Center and the Mall of America) are located within a 15-minute drive of each other on the southern edge of the Twin Cities. The Mall of America (or MOA, as some call it) will celebrate its 10th birthday in August. And it was 50 years ago this year that developers announced the plans for Southdale, the complex that can rightfully be considered MOA's "great grandmother."

Farrell explores this cultural phenomenon in a book about American malls that will be published in 2003 by the Smithsonian Institution Press. "The United States now has more shopping centers than high schools," he notes in the book's introduction.

The International Council of Shopping Centers reported that in 2000, America's shopping centers served 196 million Americans a month, Farrell explains. We go to malls 3.2 times a month, and spend an average of $71.04 each time (a one-third increase in spending from 1995 to 2000). America's malls employ more than 10.6 million workers, about 8 percent of the non-farm workforce in the country. Shopping centers also support the U.S. government, generating $46.6 billion in sales taxes, almost half of all state tax revenue.

The phenomenon is spreading, too, though response has varied throughout the world. While malls are increasingly popular in Eastern Europe and Asia, the Scandinavian countries have placed significant restrictions upon such developments, Farrell reports. "Even Havana has a mall," says Nelson, who explored the facility while traveling in Cuba in connection with a St. Olaf Interim program.

Southdale was America's first fully enclosed, air-conditioned, multi-level shopping center, says Farrell. When it debuted in 1956, commentators said that "it was 'more downtown than downtown,'" Farrell says. Designed to create a new community for the burgeoning suburbs, the development was announced in 1952 and opened just a year after Disneyland did. Both were forms of "entertainment retail," which sold "experiences" along with a variety of commodities.

The Mall of America may be the ultimate iteration of that concept. It is certainly the largest in the United States, boasting 2.6 million leasable square feet (more than twice the square footage of the current Southdale) and Camp Snoopy (where neither rain, sleet, snow, nor blistering summer heat prevents families from enjoying a variety of rides).

Those families come from all over the United States and the world. It is estimated that more than 350 million people have visited the facility since it opened in 1992, making it the state's largest tourist attraction. As a story in the Minneapolis-based StarTribune noted in 2001, it "attracts more visitors annually than Disney World, Graceland and the Grand Canyon combined."

Some of those visitors are college students and academicians. In 1993, for instance, St. Olaf used the MOA as a textbook, introducing first-year students to liberal arts education by busing them to Bloomington and instructing them to analyze everything from the "arts" of the mall (including the different kinds of music played in the stores) to its economic, sociological and technical aspects.

"Two years earlier, the common reading was Antigone, Nelson wrote in Mall of America, published in 1998. "The preceding year it had been selected Federalist Papers. In 1993 it was to be the Mall of America. These days everything is a text."

The students ? and their mentors ? discovered that malls are about a lot more than shopping, as Farrell also points out in the introduction he submitted to the Smithsonian Institution Press for his forthcoming book:

"Shopping centers reflect and affect personal perceptions, social norms, religious beliefs, ethical values, cultural geography, domestic architecture, foreign policy and social psychology in this country. The artifacts in shopping centers are also complex, with material form and symbolic meaning. Shopping is no simple task."

Creating the spaces in which this experience takes place is no simple task, either. Jon Jerde, the designer of the MOA intended that when shoppers arrived at the complex they would find each other, to some extent, says Farrell. "His web page notes that 'The communal experience is a designable event.'"

The mall experience may be communal, responds Nelson, but it isn't a community. Not a real one, anyway. While the population on view at the MOA may be considerably more diverse than Minnesota is racially and ethnically, it is far from diverse economically. "There are no homeless people," he points out.

There is, however, carefully packaged, carefully controlled fun. "As one commentator noted, Nelson says, 'malls are TVs that you move around in.'"

And as with television, the end result could be anything from a number of wasted hours or some significant insights into American life and values. It depends a lot on how much you're willing to put into the enterprise. Farrell and Nelson have been willing to put in a lot ? and to share their findings with others.

"Malls are a form of popular philosophy," says Farrell. "They're a place where we answer important questions like: What does it mean to be human? What are people for? What's the meaning of things? Why do we work? What do we work for? And what, in fact, are we shopping for? Like colleges and churches, malls provide answers for these critical questions.

"Like colleges, malls are places where we make statements about the good, the true and the beautiful. Like churches, they are places where we decide what's ultimately valuable, and how we will value it. Malls are places where we act out ? and institutionalize ? our values."

Contact David Gonnerman at 507-786-3315 or gonnermd@stolaf.edu.