Shopping center: the utopia of neoliberalism

There is one space that, in a concentrated way, characterizes the neoliberal era: the shopping mall. It is what anthropology calls a "non-place"—a place that has neither space nor time. Supermodernity, according to Marc Augé, is a producer of non-places.

When speaking of non-place, one refers to a kind of negative quality of place, an absence of place in itself. Going to a non-place is defining a way of being in the world, of relating to what one consumes and to oneself. The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relationship, but rather solitude, according to Augé.

A veritable system is created in which one part refers to another, closing in on itself. From this arises a kind of consumer world system that every individual can claim as their own, because they are constantly challenged by it.

The world of globalized advertising produces a false identity in everyone. "A gasoline brand billboard is a reassuring sign for them, and they find, with relief, on supermarket shelves, cleaning or food products consecrated by international media," according to Augé. Reencountering the brands that advertising daily instills in everyone's mind gives a false sense of reconnection with oneself. Stumbling upon Itaú bank branches in Buenos Aires or another Latin American city reinforces the feeling that the consumer is not helpless, that they can always appeal to their bank manager.

In this sense, non-place is the opposite of utopia—it is a rootless, deterritorialized territory. And an increasingly large part of humanity lives, more and more, in this situation of deterritorialization. “The experience of non-place is today an essential component of all social existence,” according to Augé. And he concludes: “It is in the anonymity of non-place that the communion of human destinies is experienced in solitude.”

Paradoxically, shopping malls promote a process of liquidation of traditional urban centers—those territories with which people used to identify, assuming their identity by living in that city. It is no coincidence that the model city of postmodernity is Los Angeles, a city, by definition, without a center.

People are increasingly leaving their neighborhoods and circulating more and more throughout the city — except for those who are forced to make enormous daily commutes to work far from where they live.

According to Beatriz Sarlo's definition, a shopping center is "a simulacrum of a city, in which all the extremes of the urban environment have been suppressed": bad weather, noise, chiaroscuro, advertising posters, painted walls—in short, the marks of urban identity.

The shopping mall is the opposite of the urban landscape of city centers. Its purpose is that of "a space capsule housed in the aesthetics of the market." The homogeneity that these spaces assume makes them all practically the same, wherever we are: in the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Guatemala, or South Africa. They only differ in the national currency of each country, the language spoken, or some other detail of little importance.

The constant presence of global brands, their logos, and the uniformity of the spaces make the shopping center "a paradise or a nightmare," in the words of Beatriz Sarlo. The air is always clean thanks to the recycling of air conditioning units, the lighting is functional, and closed-circuit systems allow for total control of the circulation of people and everything that happens, through a central system that functions like a panopticon.

Like a spaceship, a shopping mall offers all the reproductive activities of life: eating, drinking, shopping, going to the bank, and to the theater. Only a maternity ward and a cemetery are missing to complete all the cycles of life within its walls. Like a spaceship, everything is arranged in such a way that one loses their sense of direction: everything is so similar that it's difficult to distinguish where one is, constantly requiring guidance from specialists and signs indicating routes, floors, escalators, shops, restrooms, and food courts.

Everything is driven by the sales strategy — to subject people, most of the time, to the temptations of store offers. To go from one floor to another, you have to cross the entire floor, with the corresponding display of all its shops. And everything is commerce. The only free spaces, so far, are, for example, the places where children play, allowing their parents to shop more easily.

In Montevideo, the building that was once the Punta Carretas penitentiary, which housed thousands of militants imprisoned and tortured in the fight against the dictatorship, has retained its facade but has become a shopping center. As if, in capitalism, the opposite of prison were not, for example, a cultural center, but rather a space of freedom of purchase, where globalized stores occupy the spaces of prisoners' cells and places of interrogation and torture.

Like a capsule, the shopping mall has a relationship of indifference, of ignorance, towards the city that surrounds it. Although its exterior space may be a favela, a highway, or any other urban space, the mall is completely oblivious to all of that. It represents a rupture in relation to the city, from which the urban geography, with all its social dimensions, completely disappears. It is protected from everything that happens outside.

Shopping malls, as typical expressions of non-places, usually have neither clocks nor windows, as if to abolish time and space: "Day and night are not differentiated; time does not pass, or the time that passes is a time without qualities," according to Beatriz Sarlo. "The city does not exist for the shopping mall, which was built to replace the city," she states.

Hence the forgetting of everything that surrounds it. Its own construction is the opposite of the construction of a neighborhood or a city—little by little, house by house, street by street, square by square. The construction of the shopping mall is a birth without pregnancy: it emerges from the drawing board of its designer directly into reality. It bursts into a specific place as if it had fallen from the sky, without history, without any connection to the place where it landed. What matters is the consumer public that will frequent it and impose consumption styles in an absolute void of urban memory.