While becoming less relevant in the United States, shopping malls are booming throughout urban Latin America. But what does this mean on the ground? Are shopping malls a sign of the region’s “coming of age”? El Mall is the first book to answer these questions and explore how malls and consumption are shaping the conversation about class and social inequality in Latin America. Through original and insightful ethnography, Dávila shows that class in the neoliberal city is increasingly defined by the shopping habits of ordinary people. Moving from the global operations of the shopping mall industry to the experience of shopping in places like Bogotá, Colombia, El Mall is an indispensable book for scholars and students interested in consumerism and neoliberal politics in Latin America and the world.

Part memoir and part study of modern life, Shopping Mall examines the modern mythology of the shopping mall and the place it holds in our shared cultural history.

AUTOPSY OF AMERICA; The Death of a Nation is a harrowing look deep inside the crumbling apocalyptic landscape of America through the eyes of Photojournalist Seph Lawless. Autopsy of America takes you through the tattered remnants of the United States of America in a way that you never seen before. The beautiful apocalyptic landscapes consisting of abandoned schools, factories, shopping malls, amusement parks, theaters, hospitals, sport arenas, homes even entire towns offer a visual diagnostic to some of the county's true ills. The captivating images are accompanied by Lawless' personal anecdotes and thought-provoking stories that are equally riveting as the images.

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The shopping mall is both the most visible and the most contentious symbol of American prosperity. Despite their convenience, malls are routinely criticized for representing much that is wrong in America—sprawl, conspicuous consumption, the loss of regional character, and the decline of Mom and Pop stores. So ubiquitous are malls that most people would be suprised to learn that they are the brainchild of a single person, architect Victor Gruen. An immigrant from Austria who fled the Nazis in 1938, Gruen based his idea for the mall on an idealized America: the dream of concentrated shops that would benefit the businessperson as well as the consumer and that would foster a sense of shared community. Modernist Philip Johnson applauded Gruen for creating a true civic art and architecture that enriched Americans' daily lives, and for decades he received praise from luminaries such as Lewis Mumford, Winthrop Rockefeller, and Lady Bird Johnson. Yet, in the end, Gruen returned to Europe, thoroughly disillusioned with his American dream. In Mall Maker, the first biography of this visionary spirit, M. Jeffrey Hardwick relates Gruen's successes and failures—his work at the 1939 World's Fair, his makeover of New York's Fifth Avenue boutiques, his rejected plans for reworking entire communities, such as Fort Worth, Texas, and his crowning achievement, the enclosed shopping mall. Throughout Hardwick illuminates the dramatic shifts in American culture during the mid-twentieth century, notably the rise of suburbia and automobiles, the death of downtown, and the effect these changes had on American life. Gruen championed the redesign of suburbs and cities through giant shopping malls, earnestly believing that he was promoting an American ideal, the ability to build a community. Yet, as malls began covering the landscape and downtowns became more depressed, Gruen became painfully aware that his dream of overcoming social problems through architecture and commerce was slipping away. By the tumultuous year of 1968, it had disappeared. Victor Gruen made America depend upon its shopping malls. While they did not provide an invigorated sense of community as he had hoped, they are enduring monuments to the lure of consumer culture.

Are there potentials in central city revitalization? What role will the federal government play in determining future retail locational choices? Shopping center development has never been more popular-or more hazardous than it is today. Retail distribution in the United States has greater efficiency than anywhere else in the world, a tribute to the adaptability and rationalization of systems which have characterized the field. The pressures of the future, however, require greater exertion if they are to be adequately met. The industry drive to the new "middle markets" may change the face of small city America-or it may lead to a blind alley. As central cities, aided by EDA (Economic Development Administration) and UDAG (Urban Development Action Grant), gird up for revitalization in the face of reduced real buying power, these issues take on increased vigor. A whole new legal fabric is evolving in the development of major commercial facilities. Does it mark the path of the future-or is it an ineffectual last gasp effort to reshape the basic overwhelming trend lines of American life? How do we get a grasp on these parameters? Whether city planner, economic or marketing consultant, investor, or developer-much of our future depends on the answers. The authorities brought together for these specially sponsored papers are the best in the business-and provide key insights into this dynamic field. Demographics and consumer response that challenge marketing and planning professionals are also included.

Throughout the 1980s, as America's downtown districts declined in importance and the "big-box" stores began their slow march across the country, malls became increasing central to American popular culture, dominating the social life of a large swath of the population. In 1989 Michael Galinsky, a twenty-year-old photographer, drove across the country recording this change: the spaces, textures and pace that defined this era. Starting in the winter of 1989 with the Smith Haven Mall in Garden City Long Island, Galinsky photographed malls from North Carolina to South Dakota, Washington State and beyond. The photos he took capture life in these malls as it began to shift from the shiny excess of the 1980s towards an era of slackers and grunge culture. Malls Across America is filled with seemingly lost or harried families navigating their way through these temples of consumerism, along with playful teens, misfits, and the aged. There is a sense of claustrophobia to the images, even in those that hint at wide commercial expanses - a wall or a ceiling is always there to block the horizon. These photos never settle or focus on any one detail, creating the sense that they are stolen records of the most immediate kind.