A phenomenology of the mall: If the mall makes us feel bad, why do we keep going back? In a world poisoned by capitalism, what makes life worth living? Kate Black grew up in West Edmonton Mall – a mall on steroids, notorious for its indoor waterpark, deadly roller coaster, and controversial dolphin shows. But everyone has a favourite mall, or a mall that is their own personal memory palace. It's a place people love to hate and hate to love – a site of pleasure and pain, of death and violence, of (sub)urban legend. Blending a history of shopping with a story of coming of age in North America's largest and strangest mall, Big Mall investigates how these structures have become the ultimate symbol of late-capitalist dread – and, surprisingly, a subversive site of hope. "Speaking as a child of PacSun and Hot Topic myself, Big Mall is like a madeleine dipped in Orange Julius. Like a mall, the book itself has a lot of everything, a sublime mix of memoir, history, and cultural criticism. Kate Black is a learned Virgil in the consumerist Inferno, always avoiding the obvious and leading us to surprising connections—oil, suicide, Reddit, squatters, dolphins. Whether malls fill you with nostalgia or horror, this book will change your relationship to the world we've constructed around us.” – Tony Tulathimutte, author of Private Citizens "Before there was Instagram, there was the mall. But what happens when a seasonless, tacky, fantasyland is all you knew growing up? How does one embrace a genuinely fake experience? Or to be more precise, a fake but genuine experience? Kate Black’s Big Mall is a smart, sentimental, and perspective-shifting look at the outsized role that big malls play in modern life. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, one thing’s for sure: after reading this book, you’ll never look at a mall in the same way again." – Ziya Tong, Science broadcaster & author of The Reality Bubble

The Bear family visits the mall, but Papa gets lost when he decides he's too old to hold hands.

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.

Downtown Brooklyn's Fulton Mall is one of the most bustling public spaces in New York City. A colossus of commerce, itwelcomes over one hundred thousand shoppers daily and ranks among the most profitable commercial real estate in the entire country, and is also home to some of the city's most recognized institutions, including cheesecake mecca Junior's, that have been immortalized in song, film, and culture. Despite its historic link to Brooklyn's past and its financial success as a shopping district, Fulton Street is rarely celebrated in New York. The street's hand-painted signs, customized jewelry, rare sneakers, mega-church, and vendors offer a special sampling of noncorporate commerce, but many consider its sensorial and physical density a sign of blight. Misunderstandings about race, class, and profitability have led Fulton Street to be characterized as run-down, dangerous, or underutilized, and as a result it has been subject to nearly continuous renovation. Recently rezoned and becoming increasingly attractive to national chain stores, Fulton Street is once again poised for big changes. Street Value is a challenge to creatively rethink the planning and urban design of Fulton Street and other urban shopping districts. Street Value explores the mall's historical and contemporary conditions through original essays, oral histories, new and archival photographs, historic documents, and interviews with key planners, developers, city officials, historians, and activists from the 1960s to the present. Street Value probes the ideology of redevelopment and demonstrates how commercial, governmental, and activist forces have coalesced to produce one of Brooklyn's most legendary public spaces.

Profiling malls as intersections of American consumer marketing, the media, and street culture, an examination of malls as reflections of commercial and social culture considers what malls mean to ordinary people.

This is what austerity looks like: a nation surviving on the results of what conservatives privately call "the progressive nonsense" of the Big Society agenda. In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, but takes in Belfast, Aberdeen, Plymouth and Brighton, Hatherley explores modern Britain's urban landscape and finds a short-sighted disarray of empty buildings, malls and glass towers. Yet while A New Kind of Bleak anatomizes "broken Britain," Hatherley also looks to a hopeful future and discovers fragments of what it might look like. Illustrated by Laura Oldfield Ford, author and artist of Savage Messiah.

Shopper’s Paradise: Retail Stores and American Consumer Culture deals with the cultural, social and economic impact of retail stores on American society. It has chapters on some of the most important retail genres, such as Internet stores (Amazon.com), department stores (Neiman Marcus), coffee shops (Starbucks), big-box stores (Walmart, Costco) and a number of other kinds of stores such as dollar stores, malls, and farmer’s markets.