Community college classes in the old mall movie theater. A DMV office across from the Starbucks. Maybe a local library between the Victoria’s Secret and the Gap.
Mall and strip center owners are turning to untried and untraditional tenants to brighten dark storefronts as the sluggish economy sends more retailers to bankruptcy or forces others to scale back their expansion plans.
Troubled times in the Drive-in Utopia…
This story speaks volumes about how degraded the public sphere has become, and how the “Mall” is a pathetic simulacrum of it. Malls are, and remain, private property. You can’t fully exercise your 1st Amendment rights in a Mall. (You can’t fully exercise them around elected officials or candidates for political office anymore either, but that’s another matter).
Malls, like the rest of suburbia, are an unsustainable mode of existence that were made temporarily possible by comparatively inexpensive, wide availability of fossil fuels to power the whole mess.
Malls do not have a future.
Libraries do.