this post was submitted on 19 Jun 2023
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
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Victor Gruen who effectively created the modern shopping mall, originally envisioned them as the center of a full-fledged community including apartments, schools, medical, parks, etc. Because Southdale Mall (1956) was commercially successful, the developers never bothered to implement the rest of his design and everything since has only inherited the commercial aspects. Since they acted as a de facto third place, the shortcomings never became apparent – but with the rise of anti-loitering ordinances, the deaths of the major anchors, and the shift to online shopping, malls no longer had anything to tie them to the community.
Marc Augé even called them "non-places", spaces without any sense of identity and belonging. Everything in there is just optimized for consumption and commerce. Malls are very specialised as you described, rendering them obsolete as soon as circumstances shift a little. Just speaks die the short-sightedness of their developers and the municipality that thought of them as a good idea.