The mall is the city

Could a place like Chandler, Ariz. offer its residents the same kind of retail offerings without benefit of chain stores? Could local merchants provide the equivalent variety and prices of, say, California Pizza Kitchen, Cheesecake Factory, Bed Bath & Beyond, Linens-n-Things, Barnes & Noble, Borders, PetSmart, Circuit City, Best Buy, Lowe’s, Home Depot, Pottery Barn, the Gap, Ann Taylor and Banana Republic? Well, no, which is why Virginia Postrel believes that chain stores deserve more credit than they're often given by big-city snobs who bemoan the fact that every U.S. community looks alike. Writing in the Atlantic (subscription required), Postrel points out that the nation's homogeneity isn't a bad thing because most folks stay close to home and aren't especially interested in whether one city or another looks the same. All they really care about is what's in their backyard. Postrel also pens a piece in the LAT's Current section in which she discusses how open-air centers like The Grove or even Universal's CityWalk reflect their communities in ways that the initial naysayers never anticipated. Postrel, who used to live in L.A. when she edited Reason magazine, came back to examine CityWalk:

On a Sunday evening in July, the place was absolutely packed. Families and friends by the hundreds were out enjoying the bustle, the neon lights, the night air, the music blasting from the public stage. A few people carried shopping bags, but most seemed just to be hanging out. Contrary to the prophets of a decade earlier, they were generally locals, and I was about the only pale-faced blond in sight. CityWalk wasn't separate from the real Los Angeles. It was emphatically part of it. It seemed less like a mall this time and more like a city.

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In fact, CityWalk says far more about the state of shopping centers than it does about the state of cities. Over the last decade and a half, the once-monolithic mall has become more diversified, more aesthetically appealing and more porous. Outdoor "lifestyle centers," often without department stores, are reinventing the city street, while traditional malls revamp to provide more entertainment, more restaurants, more appealing public spaces and more reasons to linger. After five decades of experiment and evolution, the American shopping center is finally beginning to fulfill its inventor's dream: to re-create the human-scale European city "filled, morning and evening, day and night, weekdays and Sundays, with urban dynamism."