The right to the mall

As the Coop Shopping Mall opened in Le Piagge in 2002, the inhabitants of this modernist 1960s neighborhood located west of Florence and usually depicted as a slum undoubtedly had a great relief: finally they could read a newspaper in the mall’s coffee shop without driving too long distances. To them the development of the mall represented at least a partial fulfillment of their right to the city. Situations like this are everything but rare, not only in Italy. However malls are rarely considered by planners as opportunities to provide high-quality public places. Instead, they are variously regarded as cathedrals of alienated consumption, regrettable products of globalization, killers of small retail and of urban life: in our imagery malls are basically non-places. This way of conceiving them is a major obstacle to seizing one of the major opportunities for suburbs to become better places to live. Urban planners’ attitude towards malls is part of their general stance towards suburbs. This comes from the enduring myth of the Old City, which is still propagated, “as the immediately available and exclusive model for current urban design and development” (Sieverts). This way of conceiving suburban malls is also at the heart of a public discourse which generally ostracizes them, even when they prove to be highly beneficial to the neighborhoods which they serve. Starting from the empirical evidence provided by a certain number of case studies, this paper argues in favor of a paradigm shift in our way of looking at malls.