Is a shopping mall alive?

摘要

Would you compare a shopping mall to a mountain? Or a wolf? Or a butterfly? In Thinking Like a Mall, Steven Vogel argues that it is unfair to care about the last three and consider them living, and not do the same for the shopping centres of this world. This may strike you as illogical or even absurd. But that is the point. It is a provocative conceit that strikes at the heart of romantic notions of wilderness. But let us say we entertain the idea - what can it tell us about how we should live in the world? And about the things we create? Vogel, a professor of philosophy at Denison University in Granville, Ohio, looks for answers in that most reviled of commercial ventures, the shopping mall. He has a specific one in mind, the City Center Mall in downtown Columbus, Ohio, which opened in 1989 and was demolished in 2010. Vogel delights in describing its dreary, occasionally garish, features: a giant, windowless edifice housing a Cinnabon bakery, winding escalators, outposts of Macy's and The Nature Company, a scented-candle shop, big-screen TVs and, eventually, a tattoo parlour bearing the legend: "Put some class on your ass."