Where else are the lifted truck kids going to hang out if not a 3 acre parking lot?
i always thought that was a local phenomenon but it's really reassuring to know it happens everywhere
Potentially hot take, but I kind of miss actual malls in the sense of having some sort of communal meeting place where people come together. The downside, obviously, was capitalism, but I can't help but to imagine what a mall might look like in a true socialist society.
well, malls are indeed a substitute for public space. the entire idea behind them is to recreate the experience of living downtown but contained within the suburban sprawl. i don't blame you one bit if you view them the way they're intended to be experienced as. i suppose there would be little to no malls under socialism or whatever because there would be more emphasis placed in public spaces, thus making malls kinda redundant.
i always thought that malls came about much later than white flight but looking at malls within suburbia as like an extension of/related to white flight is really interesting and makes a lot of sense
I've been reading about it and Victor Gruen, the man credited with coming up with the idea of the mall, never made the intent to segregate explicit to my knowledge. But developers and city planners who embraced the idea of the mall sure did.
Victor Gruen also died bitter about how developers had sullied the idea and "would refuse to pay allimony for those bastard developments". I dunno, the man had to know that the developers and the powerful clients who had commissioned him intended their futuristic projects to have carefully vetted tenants inhabiting them. For a man who supposedly hated cars, he sure added shitton of parking space to his architectural designs, and for a man who wanted to recreate the viennese town centre in the middle of minnesota, he sure made some fuck awful concrete boxes. He's just filled with contrasts, I guess.
I don’t miss malls but I like that a few malls have been converted into assisted living villages for elderly dementia patients.
converting malls has lots of potential. skate parks, libraries, free housing. they'll probably just end up getting bull dozed and replaced with walmarts though. fuck america
Counter point: plazas are great when you're like 15 and every other place kicks you out for loitering cause they have security guards that actually give a shit.
Grocery store➡️department store➡️pharmacy➡️local restaurant(4th one in this location over the last 4 years)➡️hardware store➡️miscellaneous➡️chain fast food restaurant➡️Chain low level dine in restaurant (located in middle of parking lot)
I wish. So many times I’ve wanted to pick something up and thought damn I wish there was a RadioShack
For real. Like do I really need to have these capacitors shipped all the way from China? Is that really efficient? To ship 8 small components halfway across the world?
Every once in a while I can open my third eye and see these places for the nature they were before being covered with a layer of asphalt. Like buffalo, old growth forest, insects, all that good shit. Its really sad to think about
I once went to an exhibit on the Cherokee when I was in college. There was all the stuff you expect to see including their efforts to assimilate with the colonizers (learning English, converting to Christianity) but at the end there was just a hallway full of photos from the local area today showing what we did with the lands after making those people walk to Oklahoma and it was all just strip mall shit like this. One was actually a massive Wal Mart just out in a field, not even the usual Gamestop next door.
Museums are cool and good.
Native American nations practiced intensive agricultural and ecological management for a very long time before Europeans paved anything. That gets forgotten a lot. There was never a "Pristine old growth natural forest" in America, there have always been people living here, managing the forests and the plains to produce the resources people needed to live.
Humans are invasive species, 100%, but I'd trade the local Walmart for some good ol' hunting the mega fauna to extinction any day
American architecture is really fucking depressing as an European.
I can't imagine not being able to walk to the nearest supermarket or bar, sounds alienating as fuck.
I love how most European cities have an actual plaza or a square and people actually hang out in them. If you hang out anywhere in view of other people in America you get the cops called on you
I would call this a strip mall personally.
But I wouldn’t be surprised if it was called like Towne Plaza or something similar.
They make a lot of sense if you want to sell cars, segregate races, and make sure no one talks to their neighbors about joining the union.
Read that as subaru at first, and was like hey I think bajas are sweet
Wait, is that what it is? Generally they're their own building like IHOP.
We could just make them green spaces with pedestrian and cycling lanes.
Wait, Hummer going brrrrrrr
rip up the parking lots and put a bunch of trees and walking paths
way cooler
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