Last Saturday afternoon, as I was walking through Soho, I imagined the people marching on the street carrying cardboard signs instead of shopping bags. For a moment, the signs of this massive procession did not read “H&M”, “Gap” and “Uniclo” but “People, before profit,” “We are the 99 percent” or “I’d rather be working.” The rush and urgency in their expression did not concern the next bargain, but the future of America. I was on my way to the Tribeca Architecture and Design Film Festival, where our documentary film was going to be screened. “The Gruen Effect” is the story of the Austrian born architect Victor Gruen, who attempted to recreate Vienna’s urbanity in the sprawling suburbs of postwar America and invented the shopping mall.

Already in the late thirties Gruen and his then wife, Elsie Krummeck, promoted the building of “shopping towns,” which promised to combine commercial and civic spaces and counter the a-geography of the suburbscape with a cultural and social center. They claimed that the complexes would ease women’s lives, and integrate shopping into living. But as de-industrialization proceeded, the power of consumption began to drive the US economy, and shopping prepared the path to post-industrialism. The shopping mall became a blueprint for inner city re-development and an engine of the post-industrial economy. It integrated living into shopping. Looking back upon the translation errors and ironies of his life, Gruen argued at the end of his life that developers had high-jacked his concept of the shopping town. He “disclaimed paternity once and for all” and refused to “pay alimony to those bastard developments.” (Film on Gruen embedded below.)

Walking along Broadway and watching the crowd moving in and out of stores, I realized again how much the film was a story about the city of New York. I wished the voices from Zuccotti Park, located only a few blocks south of the movie theater, would be loud enough to inspire the discussion after the screening. With these insights into the making of the commerce driven mall-city on display in Soho, what can we claim for the future of urban development? What, I asked myself, would it mean if we came to an understanding that architecture and city planning are not only tools to mark distinction, exclusion and corporate omnipotence (see Ground Zero), but can also be means of radical redistribution? What if we see architecture and urban planning as technologies of social justice? What if we think of a truly alternative usage of the nation’s empty shopping spaces, estimated to be the size of the city of Miami? What if the dead and suffering malls would be retrofitted not as churches or fake local storefronts, but as massive think tanks for the grand remodeling of the US economy? What kind of public spaces would we be able to create, and how could they support our growing social movement?

The Gruen Effect: Victor Gruen and the Shopping Mall,
by Anette Baldauf and Katharina Weingartner,
A 2010, 54 min, Co-production: pooldoks – ORF/RTR/FFW

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8LHgUfBdzM