EMERGENCE MEANS SURPRISES.

The architect who came up with the idea of the enclosed shopping mall didn't like what it became.

In the late ‘70s, the culture power of the mall was on the rise. But the father of this uniquely American space, Victor Gruen was already disowning his creation, declaring, in 1978, that he’d like to disclaim his paternity. “I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments,” he said in a speech in London. “They destroyed our cities.” Gruen, a Austrian socialist who fled his native country in 1938 had a vision of the mall was as a “third place,” a walkable space for community-building. The mall was to be a foil to the emergent culture of interstates and isolating suburbs.

“He wanted to recreate the plazas of his home city, Vienna, or the town squares and main streets of American cities and towns—a place to come together, to walk, to shop, to live their lives,” [fashion writer L. M.] Helms explained. The mall, in Gruen’s mind, was to be much more than an assortment of fast retail options but a place in which to foster culture itself. “He imagined that these malls would be mixed-use facilities, with apartments, offices, medical centers, child-care facilities, and libraries.”

America’s first indoor mall was the Southdale Mall in Edina, Minnesota. Opening in 1956, the mall serves as a vivid example how easily Gruen’s optimistic rendering was derailed. After the success of the initial shops that occupied the Southdale, plans to build a lake, residences, and medical facilities were quickly abandoned, as attention turned towards developing more shopping centers. The Southdale Center, today, is surrounded by parking lots today making it the prototype for many thousands of paved over spaces across the country. As Helms pointed out, Gruen’s plan of translating urban community characteristics to the suburbs backfired— convenience malls created simply expedited a post-war exodus from the cities, resulting in the very car-centered suburban sprawl he abhorred. “[Malls] did become a place where people congregate, but not as a community as Gruen hoped—they congregated to shop, to mall walk, to waste time.”

That's what happens when two Technocratic Visions collide.  Walt Disney's "Main Street" entrance plazas to Disneylands replicated the mixed use facilities, if strictly for retail purposes.  Latter-day strict zoning codes, perhaps with visions of Futurama dancing in the Wise Experts heads, made the shopping center just off the expressway with lots of parking the Preferred Setting.

Running expressways through city centers?  Experiment against reality.

Concentrating retail in enclosed malls?  Lowered search costs, until search engines running at the speed of light beat out 427 engines running at the speed of traffic.