MobyDig

a strict opponent of shopping centers that offered nothing beyond consumerism; he was a champion of holistic, environmentally friendly city planning focusing on the needs of individuals. Shopping malls were conceived to be third spaces, social gathering places in addition to the established social environments of home and work. Gruen hoped to recreate the experience of shop-lined streets mixed with cafes and restaurants, just as he remembered from his native Vienna.

Instead of building this Dream mall, which sells us more things we don’t need, we could house the homeless, build huge greenhouses for growing food, build a hospital, design the space around publicly determined needs, or, better yet, just leave the area, the swampland, natural. Contrary to the human-centric notion of swamps as ugly, unlivable places — places that throughout history had to be 'drained' and controlled and dominated by humans — swamps are important areas of biodiversity that we would do well to preserve and protect (especially since increased development over wetlands contributes to flooding).

Ah, but this is what America does best: spend decades’ worth of resources and taxpayer dollars on things only meant to serve wealthy investors that no one else really needs. No one except ten-year-old me, back in 2004, before I knew what things really were.

But ten-year-olds eventually grow up. They eventually leave childhood to become adults, to realize the world doesn’t revolve just around them, that they have to take other people’s considerations into account. The mall wasn’t created by ten-year-olds. It was created by a society whose culture and values are like those of children in that these values seem not to have evolved past some primitive and environmentally destructive phase, that of consumer capitalism, which operates in a perpetual state of profit seeking despite obvious harm to humans and all other forms of life on earth. I thought the mall would show me my inner child, or nurture my inner child. Instead it reminded me how fucked we are if we don’t find a way to evolve beyond this toxic way of organizing our society around profit."