The beautiful artificiality of the American mallscape

Not far from where I live there’s a Starbucks where I sometimes work in the mornings, and a Target where I sometimes run errands. The two are about a half-mile from each other, and because it’s silly to drive that short of a distance, if I have reason to go from one to the other, I’ll walk. Yet even though there’s a sidewalk in front of the Starbucks, and a sidewalk in front of the Target, and sidewalks in front of nearly every other surrounding business, it only takes a few steps to see that these are mainly decorative. Without a car, getting from strip mall to strip mall in my town requires crossing busy intersections (often with no designated crosswalks), cutting across full parking lots, clinging to grassy embankments, and hopping from one short stretch of sidewalk to another, like an IRL game of Frogger. The best part of my makeshift Starbucks-to-Target trail is the sidewalk in front of Hampton Inn, which is separated from the parking lot by a narrow grassy patch, where the hotel’s landscapers have planted trees. From a distance, the trees looks pretty, but without much space to occupy, they’ve crowded onto the sidewalk, such that walking past them requires ducking and limbo-ing. It’s as though nobody ever expected people to actually walk on that sidewalk.
But when I used the word “best” above, I wasn’t being sarcastic. Here’s my terrible secret: I love the suburbs, and I love malls. I love chain stores and chain restaurants, and I dearly, dearly love the way that we, as imperfect-but-well-meaning human beings, try to make our places of commerce look natural. I have friends who talk about visiting relatives in regions choked with big-box stores and Olive Gardens, and they sound disconsolate. Yet this is where I live—where I’ve pretty much always lived—and I’m not eager to leave. I’m the guy in this Onion article who gets excited about the prospect of a Panera Bread opening in my neighborhood. Frequently, I crave the contrived.
Mind you, this isn’t about hating cities, or country life. I enjoy both of those, in small doses. I also hasten to add that I support local businesses as much as I can. But I think that dividing “local” from “chain” is too simplistic. Chains are local too, in their way, in that many have local owners, and nearly all hire from and pay taxes into the local economy. Anyway, Applebee’s to me is as much a part of our American heritage as the corner bar; and I’m as grateful for the new expanded Kroger near my house as I am for the farmers’ market I shop at each week. I’m not making an economic, sociopolitical, or environmental argument here; I’ve read the points for and against chains and malls, and like most of us, I try to muddle through and make choices that aren’t too destructive, though I acknowledge some failures in that area. But aside from those concerns, I find the experience of the great American mallscape to have a lot more charm than is widely acknowledged.
I think this goes hand-in-hand with my love of retro-futurism: the past’s idea of what the future will be. One of my all-time favorite pieces of American cinema—no joke—is Walt Disney’s pitch-film for EPCOT, a project that was originally conceived as an actual working city of the future, complete with bubble-domed downtown, a radial street plan, and individualized electric-rail transportation. There’s just such an pre-adolescent optimism about this idea: It’s Disney designing the ultimate “secret lair,” imagining all that people would need to live a comfortable, happy, productive life in a completely constructed habitat.