ABSTRACT
To the architect Victor Gruen, the American city suffered from “heart-problems,” but in The Heart of Our Cities (1964) he offers a diagnosis and a cure. The cure would consist in a recreation of the vibrancy of the old European cities and city squares – even in an American setting where cars, “white flight,” and suburbanization were emptying the downtowns. The invention of the shopping mall entailed a departure from the traditional city, but starting with Gruen’s Midtown Plaza a great number of shopping malls were called plazas or squares, and this choice of names reveals a longing for traditional urban spaces. With their bright atriums, many shopping malls succeeded in compensating for real urban squares with these interior spaces. The quality of life in the mall, however, has become a theme in novels such as Kingdom Come by J.G. Ballard, The Cave by José Saramago, and White Noise by Don DeLillo.
