ABSTRACT
By the late 1980s, regular visits to the shopping centre or mall had become a mainstream cultural activity. However, by the middle of the 1990s, the shopping mall was serving another purpose55 – it had also become a popular focal point for youthful delinquency. As Presdee (1994) and Taylor et al (1996) have identified, theme-enhanced shopping centres, with their mobility and (apparent) anonymity, were also functioning as sites of exploration, play and ‘invasion’ (see Fiske 1989), especially for young truants and groups of the unemployed:
For many young people, especially the unemployed, there has been a continuing congregating within the modern shopping centers ... At the mall ... young people push back the limits imposed upon them ... Young people, cut off from normal consumer power, invade the space of those with consumer power. They have become the ‘space invaders’ of the 1990s, lost in a world of dislocation and excitement; a space where they should not be. Modern consumerism demands they look, touch, and take or appropriate. This is a culture that plays at life, where the marketplace becomes like the pleasure pier of the seaside resorts, the site of pleasure, leisure, desire and, most important, a place for pushing back the limits ... But most of all it is a world of doing wrong. (Presdee 1994: 182, emphasis added)
Presdee presents a picture of the shopping centre as a place of youthful transgression, thrill and ‘carnival’: the type of place that Katz would doubtless argue is a likely environment for ‘sneaky thrills’ and ‘ludic activities’, such as shoplifting and other forms of illicit youthful activity (see Katz 1988: Chapter 2). However, certain important changes are taking place. To start with, because of pervasive high-tech security initiatives such as EAS (electronic article surveillance) tagging (see Bamfield 1994; DiLonardo 1996), ink tagging (see DiLonardo and Clarke 1996) and covert cameras, the contemporary shopping mall is more likely to be targeted by experienced ‘professional’ thieves, who have both the expertise and the technological wherewithal to circumvent such sophisticated deterrents, as opposed to the younger offender or teenage thrill-seeker. Certainly, store detectives and security contractors are more concerned with well-organised, hard-to-identify shop-lifting or ‘hoisting’ teams than they are with groups of teenagers who spend their time maundering around the food halls and arcades (the latter group being readily identifiable and thus easy to monitor and ultimately remove). Similarly, shopping centres are far more at risk from credit card fraud and ‘kiting’ (the practice of passing stolen cheques) than they are from in-house teenage incivility or disturbance (see Masuda 1993; Webb 1996). In short, the 21st century shopping centre has moved on. It no longer functions in the way it used to as a (albeit unintended) transgressive landscape for young people of the kind identified by Presdee above. The effectiveness of new methods of digital surveillance has ensured that unauthorised ‘fun’ is now strictly off limits within such hermetically sealed private spaces. Yes, you can still look, touch and (of course) consume (after all, this is what young people have been conditioned to do), but the role of consumer space as a ‘world of dislocation and excitement’ is changing. Contra Presdee, the shopping mall is now no longer ‘a world of doing wrong’, in fact quite the opposite – the shopping mall now epitomises a world of conformity and mundanity.
