The Mall as Everyday Space of Publicness: Accounts from Sanlitun Taikoo Li, Beijing


Meng Xu, University of Guelph

Scholars contest the role of malls as public spaces. While some treat malls as the spatial and symbolic materialization of urban fragmentation, exclusion, securitization, homogenization, and capitalist consumerism, others excavate the potential of malls as de facto spaces for encounters, performance of identities, and political action. Informed by and extending these latter strands of literature, I propose the concept of everyday space of publicness as an exploratory lens for analyzing ways in which urban inhabitants (re)produce the mall as public. Approaching publicness as a socio-spatial characteristic emerging from mall users’ practices, encounters, and interpretations of their experiences, everyday space of publicness sensitizes us to the specific processes by which commercialized spaces become publicized. The concept of everyday space of publicness is developed and exemplified using an ethnographic case study of Taikoo Li, an open-air mall in Beijing’s Sanlitun district. Analyzing mall life in Taikoo Li, I show how it becomes an everyday space of publicness across three dimensions: (1) spontaneous social activities; (2) cooperative practices of regulation between vendors and security guards; and (3) mall users’ tactful interpretations of the publicness they experience and produce. Although the mall is not a site for absolutely unfiltered encounters, it generates “affordances of sociability” across social differences (Horgan et al. 2020, 147). Despite the omnipresent regulation and surveillance imposed by mall authorities, participants in the unsanctioned economy actively use the mall to defend their right to the city. While mall owners deliberately seek to enhance consumption, mall users reinterpret it as an urban space for public life, unbeholden to consumerist logic.

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