That’s their right. It’s private property. Just as once upon a time the king owned the streets and decreed what happened there.

The shopping mall is effectively a privatisation of public space and a dumbing-down of social interaction.

There is one crucial difference. Gruen wanted to improve upon the American city centre by modernising and Europeanising it. Mr Caruso, by contrast, looks to the past. He has tried to re-create a kind of prelapsarian downtown where there is no crime or homelessness. His romantic evocations of city centres are possible only because people have forgotten what downtowns used to be like. And they have forgotten, of course, largely because of the suburban shopping malls that Gruen built. It was necessary to kill the American city centre before bringing it back to life.

We’ve lived out here in the boonies for about 3 years now, and set foot in basically no enclosed shopping malls in that time. A quick trip to Brisbane over the holidays had us trawling one of the big shopping centres. I can’t tell you just how *oppressive* they feel now. Dark, crowded, filled with shops full of stuff that probably sounds great when you buy the franchise, but ends up gathering dust either in your shop or in your customers home (sports memorabilia tat? Tie rack? King of knives? Gah!). The car park outside seemed like a genuine breath of fresh air.

Caruso mentioned above seems about 30 years behind the times – there are lots of small Australian towns where the main street has been outside-mallified by paving over the road and expelling cars. At least you can see the sky every now and again. And, yes, the occasional homeless person causing the white middle class ladies to clutch their precious purchases closer to their chests.