The Making of Everyday Space of Publicness: Insights from a Mall in Beijing

Abstract

The rise of malls in China raises questions about their roles as public spaces in Chinese cities. This article proposes the concept of everyday space of publicness to trace contextually sensitive ways that urban inhabitants make the mall a space for public life. The making of everyday space of publicness is evidenced using data from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in an inner-city open-air mall in Beijing. I demonstrate how the mall becomes an everyday space of publicness across three aspects: spontaneous social activities, cooperative practices of regulation, and users’ interpretations of their mall experiences. Centering on mall users’ everyday experiences and interpretations, these accounts offer nuanced insights into the dynamic relationship between urban spaces and publicness, and contribute to understanding the lived dimension of Chinese urbanism.

Introduction

While often considered to be a standardized consumerist “outpost of the globalized economy” (Salcedo 2003, 1084), mall life is conditioned by both global free-market ideology and specific political-economic and sociocultural particularities. Resulting from a series of policy reforms in the urban land, housing supply, and fiscal systems aimed at embracing “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” (Harvey 2005, 120), Chinese cities have witnessed a proliferation of malls over the past 3 decades. In contrast to typical suburban enclosed malls in North America, most malls in China are located in core inner-city areas, situated in proximity to residential complexes, accompanied by additional commercial offerings, characterized by more diverse architectural designs, and integrated with public transportation networks (Gaubatz 2008; Wang 2019; Wang and Chen 2018). These characteristics imply that Chinese malls might be used by diverse urban inhabitants in ways that may differ from their North American counterparts, showing the potential to offer spaces for vibrant public urban lives (Jewell 2015). It is, therefore, important to understand the particular ways in which the relationship between malls and urban publicness plays out from the perspective of everyday mall users in Chinese cities.

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 (Allen 2006; Cohen 1996; Goss 1993; Sorkin 1992; Staeheli and Mitchell 2006; Voyce 2006), others excavate the potential of malls as de facto spaces for encounters, the performance of identities, and political actions (Aceska and Heer 2019; Miller and Laketa 2019; Parlette and Cowen 2011; Pyyry 2016; Stillerman and Salcedo 2012; Tyndall 2010). By resorting to conceptual frameworks such as semipublic space (Pospěch 2018), privately owned public space (Németh 2009), publicly accessible space (Németh and Schmidt 2011), mass private property (Zhang 2017), quasi-public space (Sahito et al. 2020), and pseudo-public space (Wang 2019), urban analysts highlight the ambiguous public–private dynamic of mall spaces. While acknowledging the tensions between neoliberal capitalism, consumerism, the state, and the public(s) and retaining the potential of malls as domains of urban publicness, these conceptual frameworks may not sufficiently engage with how publicness is actually lived from mall users’ experiences and interpretations in their everyday lives.

In this article, 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. Aligning with existing literature on everyday space (Crawford 2012), loose space (Franck and Stevens 2006), and insurgent space (Hou 2010), this concept approaches publicness as a sociospatial characteristic emerging from mall users’ practices, encounters, and interpretations of their experiences. Everyday space of publicness further extends these analytical frameworks by emphasizing that the making of publicness is not limited to intentional revolt or specific types of spaces. As a nuanced approach to framing quasi-/semi-/pseudo-public spaces as de facto spaces for public life in cities, everyday space of publicness sensitizes us to the microlevel processes by which commercialized spaces may become publicized (Carmona 2022; Houssay-Holzschuch and Teppo 2009; Terzi and Tonnelat 2017).

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’ tactical interpretations of the publicness they experience and produce. Although the mall is not a site for absolutely unfiltered encounters, it allows the thriving of many non-/less-consumption-oriented social activities and generates “affordances of sociability” (Horgan et al. 2020, 147). Despite the omnipresent regulation and surveillance imposed by mall authorities (Staeheli and Mitchell 2006), 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.

My argument is organized into four sections. To formulate the concept of everyday space of publicness, the first section reviews the literature on the rise of malls in China as well as malls as/and public spaces, then the research site and methods are introduced. Third, I delineate how the mall is made into an everyday space of publicness by attending to characteristics of spontaneous social activities, interactions, and relationships between vendors and mall security, and mall users’ discursive understandings of the mall’s publicness. The concluding discussion highlights the implications and limitations of everyday space of publicness for generating insights into the dynamic nature of public spaces in a Chinese urban context that is already massively commercialized.

Literature Review

The Rise of Malls in China

Public spaces in contemporary Chinese cities have experienced radical transformations. During the prereform period (1949–1978), public spaces were strictly regulated by the communist regime (Flock and Breitung 2016; Gaubatz 1998). To eliminate private ownership and establish a centrally planned socialist economic system, the Chinese government constructed cities based on the spatial form of the danwei (work-unit)—“the organization of work with various social, political, economic and cultural functions” (Bray 1997, 36). Functioning as self-sufficient walled building blocks, danwei encompassed both production and residential spaces, along with a comprehensive package of welfare services. This arrangement suppressed urban inhabitants’ need for social spaces and facilities outside these mutually separated spatial units, thereby hindering the development of public spaces in cities (Wang 2019). The typical public spaces for common people during this era were limited to specific types—large-scale outdoor areas at the forefront of railroad stations, squares, and parks (Gaubatz 1998)—whose uses were restricted to the conspicuous expression of socialist superiority or state-sanctioned political gatherings.

New public spaces gradually emerged after 1978 when the central government decided to embrace “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” (Harvey 2005, 120). Unlike the shock therapy adopted by Eastern European countries, the core rationale of Chinese reform was to progressively establish a state-manipulated market economy that incorporates neoliberal elements with authoritarian control. This reform has left profound imprints on urban landscapes, leading to the proliferation of diverse public spaces, such as squares serving social rather than socialist functions (Jiang and Nakajima 2022), various commercial spaces (Wang 2019), green spaces for recreational activities (Orum et al. 2009), and transitional spaces for temporary public events (Gaubatz 2008). Particularly, the market economy (re)introduced pluralized consumption-oriented spaces for shopping, leisure, art, and culture to accommodate the diversifying lifestyles and needs of increasingly heterogeneous urban inhabitants (Wang 2019). These spaces also provide places for encounters, communication, and socialization that were impossible during the pre-reform era (Flock and Breitung 2016). As such, while it is difficult to conclude that public space in Chinese cities is expanding quantitatively, it is undergoing significant diversification (Qian 2018).

The rise of malls, as a manifestation of transforming public spaces in Chinese cities, is conditioned by a series of policy adjustments and institutional reforms. In 1988, the Chinese government separated urban land ownership, retained by the state, from use rights, which could be transferred in the free market, establishing an urban land-use market that allowed private investors to participate in urban development through commercial leases (Li 2003). The fiscal reform initiated in 1993 replaced the tax-contract system, where local governments submitted a fixed lump-sum revenue to the central government, with a tax-sharing system, in which they hand over proportionate amounts of their revenues; this change drove local authorities to promote land use rights transactions to maximize revenue (Wu 2018). The cessation of collective urban housing provision in 1998 unleashed urban inhabitants’ demand for consumption, which had previously been constrained by the danwei-based residential pattern (Wang 2019). These broad political-economic changes created a state-market coalition that aligned the needs of both the public and private sectors, facilitating significant growth in commercial urban spaces, particularly malls, in Chinese cities (Wang and Chen 2018).

Scholars have begun to explore the role of malls as public spaces, addressing themes such as architectural modernity (Jewell 2015), urban regeneration (Rocamora 2020), property rights (Wang and Chen 2018), and the evolving concept of urban publicness (Gaubatz 2008). For example, contextualizing mall development within the tension between China’s political framework and the impetus of globalized marketization, Wang (2019) traces the trajectory of the rise of malls as pseudo-public spaces; he argues that malls, although less public than publicly owned spaces, provide places for civil social life in cities. Focusing on the social production of public spaces, this emerging body of work examines the material and ideological forces that shape the planning, design, and development of malls in China. These nascent discussions enhance our understanding of the integration of malls into Chinese urbanism mainly through a political-economic lens, but a more ethnographically detailed inquiry into mall users’ experiences from a social constructionist perspective will provide granular insights into the lived potential of malls as a “keystone of Chinese ‘public’ space” (Jewell 2015, 4).

Mall as/and Public Space

Urban analysts often incorporate the rise of malls into broader narratives of the decline of public space, particularly in North America over the past three decades (Allen 2006; Bodnar 2015; Madden 2010; Mitchell 2017; Németh 2009; Orum and Neal 2010). Rooted in political-philosophical critiques of the public sphere within the capitalist economic regime, these narratives raise concerns about the devaluation of urban public culture and the challenges of revitalizing participation in urban public life. Aligning with Horkheimer and Adorno’s (2002, 98) critique of the culture industry as the “triumph of invested capital” over individual thinking autonomy, Habermas (1991, 161) observes that the collective “rational-critical debate” in public spheres tends “to be replaced by consumption.” Similarly, Sennett (2002) notes a weakening of participation in the broader public arena when situating the public sphere in urban spaces, while Sorkin (1992) argues that American public spaces are transforming into theme park-like simulations, even proclaiming the end of public space. This thesis of decline is given additional weight in the context of neoliberalism and urban entrepreneurialism (Harvey 2005), which manifests in the increasingly intense global inter-city competition for attracting capital investments (Madanipour 2019; Milbourne 2021; Wu 2018).

Malls are accordingly invoked as primary symptoms of this. Malls are depicted as “bridgeheads of an all-conquering capitalism” (Miller et al. 1998, 24), “cathedrals of consumption” (Crewe and Gregson 1998, 40), “battleships of capitalism” (Amin and Thrift 2002, 40), or even representations of “a total institution” (Mattson 1999, 135). Mall users are considered to be seduced to consume rather than create meaningful civic engagements (Miles 2010). Scholars emphasize malls’ deleterious effects on urban publicness, showing how they sanitize diversities, exclude flawed consumers, and restrict political action for profit-making (Banerjee 2001; Cohen 1996; Dovey 2016; Goss 1993; Németh 2009; Staeheli and Mitchell 2006; Voyce 2006). Malls are primarily understood as merely illusory spaces of “individualized consumerism packaged to look like public life” (Orum and Neal 2010, 202).

This totalizing understanding of malls as both causes and outcomes of the decline of public space has been challenged by recent ethnography-based studies around the world, from Johannesburg (Aceska and Heer 2019) to Santiago (Stillerman and Salcedo 2012), from Sydney (Tyndall 2010) to San Francisco (Pyyry 2016), from Toronto (Parlette and Cowen 2011) to Cape Town (Houssay-Holzschuch and Teppo 2009). Conceptualizing public space as “situated, decentered, mobile, emergent, [and] open-ended” rather than as ontologically pregiven urban formations (Qian 2020, 78; see also Koch and Latham 2012), this research illuminates how publicness thrives in malls by focusing on everyday interactions and by examining how people use malls in various societal contexts. For example, Pyyry (2016, 14) illustrates how teenage girls hanging out at a mall in San Francisco interfere with “the rhythm of the consumption community,” thereby making the space more public. Aceska and Heer (2019, 59) point to the capacity of malls to serve as public spaces “where what appears as rigid urban boundaries becomes reworked by urban dwellers’ agency” in post-apartheid Johannesburg. The public potential of malls is also highlighted when they are used for large social gatherings, from flash mobs (Molnár 2014) and Rolezinhos (Pinho 2018) to protests (Parlette and Cowen 2011).

Two key insights from the literature above inform my argument. First, I understand public space as dynamic, variegated, and contextually situated instead of as a normatively circumscribed one-size-fits-all domain. Second, the publicness of malls derives from the everyday social interactions within the space rather than exclusively from prescribed legal, economic, or political functions. In the next section, I bring together the everydayness and situatedness of public space to formulate everyday space of publicness as an analytical lens that can advance our understanding of malls’ potential for generating collective urban life.

Everyday Space of Publicness

Drawing from recent research on malls’ potential as public spaces, I now introduce the concept of everyday space of publicness. Two terms need clarification here: everyday space and publicness. Everyday space refers to mundane urban spaces where everyday life is localized, where the temporal patterns of everyday life take place; everyday life is understood as an inherently ambiguous domain pertaining to the ordinary and recurrent facets of social life that are pervasive yet largely taken-for-granted (Sztompka 2008). I understand publicness as dispersed qualities that make particular urban spaces public. Unlike work that formulates multidimensional index-based measurements to assess these qualities (Németh and Schmidt 2011), I approach publicness as an ongoing product of encounters, negotiations, and interactions between nonintimate heterogeneous persons and their interpretations of these mutual engagements in everyday spaces (Watson 2006; Young 1990). In this sense, publicness is both constituted by and constitutive of everyday space. Rather than a top-down concept imposed from without, the concept everyday space of publicness derives from urban inhabitants’ everyday experiences in urban spaces.

The concept of everyday space of publicness calls for two analytical shifts. First, it directs attention to the actuality of how urban spaces are lived, practiced, and experienced in users’ everyday lives. This aligns with a social scientific tradition that anchors everyday life as a realm “where wisdom, knowledge, and power are brought to judgement” (Lefebvre 1991, 6; see also De Certeau 1984; Goffman 1956). In particular, my conceptualization is inspired by recent scholarship on everyday urbanism detailing how urbanites’ lives are woven together by everyday spaces—“the physical domain of everyday public activity” that exists between “the home, the workplace, and the institution.” (Crawford 2012, 346). Similarly, concepts of “loose space” (Franck and Stevens 2006) and “insurgent space” (Hou 2010) highlight how public space is brought into being through spontaneous activities that defy spatial regulatory dominance. While informed by this literature, my conceptualization emphasizes that the everyday making of publicness is not limited to intentional revolt against state or corporate rule.

Second, the concept of everyday space of publicness unsettles established relationships between publicness and space. While this concept is adjacent to “everyday space” (Crawford 2012), it expands on this by destabilizing any presumed correspondence between publicness and certain types of spaces. Crawford (2012, 346) places “everyday space” (e.g., street corners and parking lots) and “carefully planned, officially designated spaces” (e.g., malls) in opposition to each other. This mode of thinking associates publicness with particular urban spaces that are usually small, invisible, and easily ignored, treating everyday publicness as something that can be only substantiated within the boundaries of these spaces (Terzi and Tonnelat 2017, 520). This risks sidestepping well-designed grand spaces as everyday spaces where publicness is also produced. To disentangle the relationship between space and publicness, I adopt the term “space of publicness” to accentuate that no single space has a privileged association with publicness and, equally, many spaces have the potential of publicness (Qian 2018).

Together, everyday space of publicness is a relational construct continually made through everyday interactions rather than a purely intellectual or imagined ideal-typical artifact. It thus serves as an analytical lens to distinguish actually existing public spaces from fixed normative ideals of public space. Everyday space of publicness attunes us to the many possible processes and dimensions whereby, beyond their commercial scope, malls can become more public. To show the making of everyday space of publicness, I now turn to the case of Beijing’s Sanlitun Taikoo Li mall.

Research Site and Methods

The ethnographic fieldwork was conducted in Taikoo Li Mall in the Sanlitun district of Beijing, China. As the capital of the People’s Republic of China, Beijing is the second-largest city in mainland China, with 16 administrative districts and a total population of 21.89 million (National Bureau of Statistics 2022). As the seat of political power for the Chinese Communist Party and a municipality directly administered by the central government, Beijing is at the heart of Chinese urbanism driven by both state power and the impetus of the market economy, functioning as “the fulcrum around which China experiments with the future of its society” (Jewell 2015, 8). Since the 1990s, when the first generation of nonstate-owned malls were spurred by Sino-foreign joint ventures, Beijing has witnessed a dramatic transformation in its consumption landscape, with many malls constructed in the lead-up to the 2008 Olympics. Nowadays, over 90% of residents of the main urban area can reach a mall within 20 minutes using public transport in Beijing (Jiang, Zhang, and Wei 2017, 1243). The central government has emphasized the importance of consumption in economic growth by planning to cultivate international consumption center cities nationwide (The State Council of China 2021), and Beijing has been designated for development into one of these cities. Given this, it is anticipated that malls will continue to expand and become more influential in the everyday lives of Beijing’s urban inhabitants.

Taikoo Li is an emblematic mall in Sanlitun, a thriving urban area located east of the city center and north of the Central Business District in Beijing. Initially developed as a location for socialist housing for state-owned enterprises in the 1950s and as Beijing’s second embassy zone in the 1960s, Sanlitun has transformed into a recreation and consumption urban hub over the past three decades. Opening in 2008, Taikoo Li has been the largest mall in Sanlitun, offering 160,000 square meters of leasable commercial space, over 200 retail stores, 70 restaurants, several multipurpose trade event venues, a hotel, a co-working space, and a cinema. Offering a mix of high-end and fast-fashion brands, the mall caters to consumers with varying purchasing power and preferences. Although my concern in this article is not with the mall as a space for consumption, its commercial viability is essential for attracting visitors.

In addition to its diverse range of retail offerings, several factors contribute to making Taikoo Li an urban space with a vibrant social life. First, unlike the typical North American mall design, which features a conventional dumbbell structure with an internal corridor flanked by anchor stores at both ends (Jewell 2015), Taikoo Li is composed of more than 20 standalone buildings distributed across two nearby but separate blocks—the southern and northern zones—connected by a 250-m pedestrian-only street. A wealth of publicly accessible outdoor spaces, such as courtyards, alleys, squares, and sunken gardens, provides human-scale environments that visitors can use for various purposes. Second, the mall is surrounded by residential complexes, enabling local residents to utilize its spaces as extensions of their living areas. Third, it is adjacent to Beijing’s second embassy zone, which houses more than 20 embassies, attracting visitors of different nationalities and racial/ethnic backgrounds. Lastly, the mall is well-connected to multiple bus and subway routes, which provides convenient access for visitors from across Beijing, including those from economically disadvantaged areas on the city’s outskirts.

Fieldwork was organized around daily visits to Taikoo Li from August to December 2021. In the initial phase, I adopted mindful walking—an embodied way of gathering empirical materials through walking “with physically and mentally flexible, free movements” (Jung 2014, 622)—as a strategy for establishing a holistic understanding of the mall spaces. I then identified specific high-use locations based on walk-by observations (Mehta 2019), recording locations, types of social activities, and numbers of people involved when I walked along the preferred paths discerned during the previous process of mindful walking. These walk-by observations drew my attention to a range of settings—the entrance area, the main square, the deck square, and the sunken garden—where I subsequently carried out 2 months of focused participant observation. Each daily session ranged between one and four hours, for a total of 120 hours. I conducted participant observation in accordance with standard social scientific procedures for examining social situations, with fieldnotes focusing on features of physical settings, and detailing characteristics of social actors and their activities (Spradley 1980).

Supplementing observational data, I conducted 65 semistructured interviews with frequent mall users recruited through snowball, accidental, and targeted sampling. Here is a snapshot of participant demographics: age 18–65 (average 30); 54% female, 40% male, 6% nonbinary; common occupations include public servants, enterprise employees, faculty, students, entrepreneurs, and freelancers; average monthly income 7,000 yuan; all Chinese with 81% living in Beijing (55% with Beijing hukou) and 19% elsewhere in China. Interviews solicited mall users’ most recent or memorable mall experiences and provided opportunities for them to express ideas about urban public spaces. Interviews were conducted in online (n = 46), in-person sit-down (n = 3), or walk-along (n = 16) formats, according to participants’ preferences. Notably, the walk-long technique was employed to generate “researcher-participant interactive capacity” and to simultaneously access participants’ in-the-moment experiences and interpretations in situ (Buhr 2021, 52; see also Kusenbach 2003). All interviews were conducted in Mandarin Chinese and audio-recorded, varying from 20 to 95 minutes. Upon completion, each recording was transcribed verbatim for subsequent analysis. Interview transcripts and fieldnotes were thematically analyzed through a multiple-stage manual coding process. Emergent themes across the observation and interview data centered on how publicness is produced through everyday mall users’ experiences and interpretations.

The Making of Everyday Space of Publicness in the Mall

Spontaneous Social Activities

Spontaneous social activities foster a sense of publicness in the mall. Due to its open-air layout, proximity to public transport, and adjacency to neighboring residential areas, the mall attracts a diverse range of people come together to create a kaleidoscopic-like social world: loitering visitors spread out everywhere and engage in people-watching; children play with scooters, mini-footballs, and spinning tops on squares; dog walkers have fleeting but friendly chats; elderly dwellers routinely occupy outdoor benches, enjoying the sunshine and walking around the looped deck square for daily exercise; street photographers tirelessly search for ideal shots; construction workers from nearby occasionally sleep on outdoor seating under trees. In some cases, people keep spatial distinctions when they make claims for different uses; in other cases, they occupy the same especially preferred spots at different times or concurrently use the same locations while maintaining porous boundaries. This creates a public rhythm that detaches from the dominance of the consumption regime in the mall. Below I show how publicness is produced and expressed through three forms of practices arising from these spontaneous social activities: (1) appropriation, (2) claiming, and (3) negotiation.

First, the mall’s sunken garden provides a setting for appropriation, where mall users suspend or change planned uses of the space through informal individual and collective activities (Amper 2023; Franck and Stevens 2006; Rennels and Purnell 2017). A hub of stylish boutiques surrounded by a spacious outdoor area with plentiful seating and trees in the mall’s northern zone, the sunken garden is a congregative place with two primary nonconsumption-related functions on weekday afternoons: a temporary after-school playground for children from neighboring schools and an informal “childcare workshop” for their guardians. Notably, children regularly appropriate the space by creatively using an installation named Harmony, a three-dimensional colored-stainless-steel sculpture modelled after ordinary Chinese houses, symbolizing ideals of familial unity. While surrounded by a circle of retractable belt barriers, the sculpture’s steel frames form an easy-to-climb scaffold for children. Climbing to the top of the installation, children undid its intended meanings and uses:

Two 7-year-old boys climbed to the sculpture first, sitting at the top and yelling to the passing crowd, “Look at me!” Children scattered around were fascinated by the boys’ athleticism and gathered in front of the sculpture. Another girl of the same age stood there for a long time, showing an eagerness to climb but a fear of heights. Her mother, standing not far away, shouted, “Go ahead! I will be watching you!” (Fieldnotes, 3 November 2021)

While children’s use of this sculpture exemplifies appropriation, we can turn to mall users’ activities in the deck square as an example of claiming. Here, claiming refers to improvised uses of underutilized spaces for novel purposes (Hou 2010). The southern end of the deck square is an expansive area with luxury fashion flagship stores on one side and a hotel’s glass curtain wall on the other. Practitioners of guangchangwu (广场舞, square dancing) claim the less-trafficked area closer to the hotel. A small-scale group of three to five women aged 55 and 70 occupies this residual space in the early evenings, with an average frequency of three times a week. Compared to more professional guangchangwu groups commonly found in municipal parks or squares (Chen 2010; Orum et al. 2009; Qian 2018), they are loosely organized without strict schedules, stage props and costumes, masterful choreography, or superior dancing skills. Their music can temporally detach the mall from its default setting as a space for consumption. Encountering the guangchangwu group performing “Awa people singing new songs,” a widespread 1960s communist song based on the folk music of China’s Wa ethnic minority, Mark, one of my walk-along interviewees, commented:

Hearing such an old song from the southwest border of China in such a trendy mall, I felt a sense of encounters between cities and countryside, modernity and tradition, and the center and the edge. These contrasting forces were subtly blended by the group of elderly female dancers. . . It made me feel like I was walking down a street square in any city in China; Taikoo Li is just a square right on these women’s doorsteps. (Interview, 7 September 2021)

Negotiation, the third aspect of the spontaneous social activity constituting the mall as everyday space of publicness, involves rewriting boundaries between spontaneous and commercial activities through ongoing dialogue between mall users and employees. Here, I shift my focus toward observations from a 50-m-long four-step staircase outside the entrance of the Apple store located on the west side of Taikoo Li’s main square. Because this staircase is underneath the building’s massive eaves which provide lots of shade, it is a popular seating area. Some mall visitors even bring portable chairs to the top of the stairs, sitting and watching the crowds flowing through the square. These undisciplined but not necessarily resistant uses of the staircase sometimes collide with commercial interests, as large groups may impede store access for potential shoppers. When large numbers used the staircase as a gathering space, Apple employees attempted to regulate the space:

A man called out, “Please move to the bench across the square.” Although most people immediately stood up and left, some chose to stay. A middle-aged woman responded, “My boy is frolicking in the fountain. Who says no one can sit here?” Another slightly older woman said, “I come here every day but never heard of any leader setting such a rule.” As the number of people sitting on the stairs decreased significantly, the man did not continue chasing away those still on the stairs. Five minutes later, the stairs became busy again. (Fieldnotes, August 20, 2021)

The three examples discussed above demonstrate how spontaneous social activities produce publicness in the mall. The noncommercial function is primary to the public but secondary to retailers (Staeheli and Mitchell 2006), and this tension between public use and profit-seeking often underpins social and spatial practices in the mall. Rather than following pre-coded spatial rules or being seduced into consumption, mall users exercise agency to appropriate existing facilities, claim underutilized spaces, and negotiate the boundaries between private profit-oriented behavior and public uses of mall spaces. In Beijing, most grandiose public space projects are designed to impress officials, tourists, and investors at the expense of addressing the needs of urban inhabitants (Miao 2011). Recent research underscores the importance of spontaneous improvisations of urban residual spaces, like parking lots and areas under highway flyovers, for everyday social activities (Chen 2010). My analysis complements this literature by presenting ethnographic evidence that these bottom-up practices of making urban publicness also occur in the mall, even though it is typically considered highly controlled and profit-driven.

Cooperative Practices of Regulation

The presence of informal vendors and their ongoing interactions with mall security guards constitute a realm for the production of publicness. It is not uncommon to encounter vendors and solicitors in or around malls (Stillerman and Salcedo 2012), and Taikoo Li is no different. Without stalls or wheeled carts, itinerant peddlers tirelessly walk around the mall, selling various wares—rose bouquets, balloons, umbrellas, multipurpose detergent sprays, makeup products, and even puppies. Similarly, because of the high traffic in the evening, solicitors from nearby hair salons, skin care centers, pubs, and gyms, congregate in the mall after dinner. Self-proclaimed fortune-tellers and panhandlers ask for money by complimenting or blessing passing mall visitors. This section analyses how publicness is produced through vendors’ everyday experiences by focusing the three interconnected points: (1) the mall as a protective umbrella for the unsanctioned economy, (2) the soft hand of mall authorities, and (3) the performative and cooperative scene of ejections.

First, the mall functions as a protective umbrella for participants in Beijing’s informal economy. Beijing’s urban master plan (2016–2035) envisages the city functioning as a compounded center of politics, culture, international communication, and technological innovation (Beijing Municipal Commission of Planning and Natural Resources 2018). In the name of population reduction and dispelling noncapital functions, an array of urban renovation campaigns and supporting policies removed floating domestic migrants from the city. Perceived as an obstruction to the plan, street vending has been made illegal as a blemish on urban beautification. Considering mall guards have no power to confiscate property or impose fines, vending in the mall’s outdoor spaces largely precludes the risk of arbitrary penalties from public security officers or chengguan (城管, street management) teams. A young female detergent peddler who intentionally used the mall as a substitute for streets that were increasingly hostile to her was well aware of the peril of working on the streets:

I realized my sales did not meet my expectations when I left the mall yesterday. I began to sell my products on the street near a subway station, and then I ran into a police officer. I was freaked out and thought, “It’s all over!” Although he just asked me to leave and warned me that I could not sell products on the street, I am still scared because I do not think I will be so lucky next time. (Fieldnotes, August 23, 2021)

Compared to increasingly restrictive policies and potentially aggressive policing on city streets, the regulatory hand of mall authorities on vendors is softer. The profit-driven nature of the mall provides a fundamental context for regulation practices most evident in regular mall security patrols as a typical example. However, mall security guards develop a flexible and tolerant stance to tackle unsanctioned economic activities. A male security guard responsible for day-to-day patrols disclosed that as long as there was no direct supervision from higher-ups or customer complaints, they usually turned a blind eye to vendors, particularly elderly vendors (Fieldnotes, September 28, 2021). This was consistent with my observations:

An elderly male, approximately 75 years old, with a huge cross-body tote bag, holding a cane in one hand and several bunches of roses in the other, stood in the crowd and sought customers. Behind this elderly vendor stood three security officers responsible for taking the temperature of visitors entering the mall; another security guard was also patrolling right in front of him. No one tried to expel this flower vendor. When the elderly vendor spat on the ground, the security guard in patrol gave him a fierce stare, which was the greatest regulation he was subjected to that evening. (Fieldnotes, October 12, 2021)

Significantly, the ejection of vendors from the mall involves collaborative scenes of performance between security personnel and vendors. Not all vendors are as tolerated as the elderly flower peddler above; dealing with ejections is a daily necessity for many. These ejections occur so often that they appear almost scripted, turning the mall into a Theatrum Mundi. Both security personnel and vendors are aware that they are playing their characters as performers (Goffman 1956): security guards persuade vendors to leave while knowing they will soon reappear, and vendors re-occupy the mall knowing that security guards will continue this “cat-and-mouse game” (Orum et al. 2009, 373). Despite occasional emotional outpourings—the reluctance from vendors and frustration from security guards—all observed ejections were successfully performed without physical confrontations or obvious verbal violence. This performance fosters a cooperative relationship in which each assists with the other’s presentation of their characters:

A middle-aged male guard approached a young man who squatted by a circular bench and promoted shoe polish to his client, and he shouted, “You cannot sell here! Get out!” The young man did not panic, continuing to sell his products to the woman sitting on the bench. The guard pretended to be tough by scolding loudly: “Little brat! Stop it now!” The young vendor glanced at the guard and said mischievously, “I am leaving! Thanks for not killing me!” The serious-faced guard snorted out a laugh. (Fieldnotes, October 17, 2021)

These performances have a strong relational quality: mutual understanding is progressively cultivated from and recursively becomes a fundamental element of such ejections. Like many vendors, most mall guards themselves are domestic migrants working on short-term contracts with the property management company. The shared positionality appears to lay a foundation for a kind of mutual understanding. It also facilitates their performances in front of the public and simultaneously promotes their backstage solidarity (Goffman 1956). Echoing the sympathy for vendors embodied by the soft hands of the guards mentioned above, vendors also expressed an understanding of the everyday regulatory duties of security personnel. As a female flower peddler said:

No one’s life is easy! Everyone needs to get their job done! It is okay that they come to eject us because that is their own job. We bump into each other every day, and we do not get disgusted with each other. (Fieldnotes, October 12, 2021)

The mall becomes a space where participants of the unsanctioned economy claim their right to the city. Aiming to maximize malls’ attractiveness to target customer groups by filtering out those who may disturb or compete with mall tenants, mall regulations are generally considered incompatible with the notion of publicness (Németh 2009; Staeheli and Mitchell 2006). By contrast, the cooperative practices of regulation between vendors and security guards in Taikoo Li contribute to turning the mall into an everyday space of publicness. This is especially important when considering that the state’s policies on controlling street vending have long been marked by a lack of transparency and consistency, with enforcement practices often being arbitrary and unpredictable in China (Xue and Huang 2015). Due to Beijing’s increasingly stringent regulatory policies, many vendors use the mall’s outdoor space as their workplace to avoid potentially violent enforcement by municipal authorities on the streets, despite still facing regulation from the mall authorities. This echoes Mitchell’s (2017) argument that publicness is always produced through struggles. Vendors’ experiences in Taikoo Li, though not always fiercely struggling, contribute to actualizing the mall’s potential as an everyday space of publicness.

Tactical Interpretations of Mall Publicness

In addition to uses, mall users’ interpretations of the public nature of Taikoo Li also constitute the mall as everyday space of publicness. Research participants employed particular interpretive tactics to assess the mall’s role as spaces of publicness in their everyday lives. My usage of the term “tactic” is consistent with de Certeau’s (1984, xix) distinction between strategy and tactic: strategy refers to the practice of people in power with scientific reason, while tactics are the daily and rebellious practices of the “weak.” By doing so, I differentiate mall users’ framings of publicness from those of experts and scholars. While some pointed out that the mall is a capitalist landscape, all participants recognized it as a primary space for their public life. This section offers insights into how ordinary mall users justify the mall as everyday space of publicness by attending to the three consistent interpretations that they offered: (1) downplaying the mall’s role as a consumption space, (2) highlighting the mall’s open spatial arrangement, and (3) contrasting the mall with other public spaces in the city.

Participants’ first tactic for interpreting the mall’s publicness involves understating the mall’s function as a consumption space. When articulating their mall experiences, participants emphasized that they visited the mall to satisfy diverse needs beyond the desire to shop. Even those wanting to splurge on consumer goods tended to identify themselves as rational consumers, noting that because they could find better prices online, they used the mall as a fitting room rather than a place for purchasing. Some offered critiques of consumerism, distancing themselves from the deceptions of commercial logic, remarking that shopping “is like having candies; the more you eat, the less sweet you feel, and the more candies you need” (Interview, September 21, 2021). Many mall users identified more readily with the publicness of the mall than with its commercial nature:

Even though I do not like fashion or shopping, I still choose to go to this mall. I know many people like me who also chose this place without hesitation. . . Is it only through consumption that we can use this mall as an urban space? Can’t we delight ourselves by just being there? I can have fun by going to the mall without spending money. (Interview, October 25, 2021)

Second, participants invoked the mall’s open-air unwalled spatial arrangement as evidence to enhance their justifications of the mall as space of publicness. They usually associated linear spaces, represented by streets, and plane spaces, in the form of squares, with their ideas of typical public spaces; these spatial configurations with openness and accessibility can be found in the mall. Although it is untenable to equate open spaces with public spaces, for users, the openness of the mall’s design is a manifestation of publicness that is fully leveraged in their everyday lives. Rex, a male participant celebrating the benefits of the open spatial layout of the mall, remarked:

The mall is unlike a stand-alone building, mansion, or department store in the middle of the city. . . You can walk into it randomly, pass by, or walk through it on your way to other destinations. Largely speaking, I think it has become a public environment. (Interview, October 16, 2021)

As technologies of enclosure and panoptic social control continuously used from the feudal emperors to the contemporary state (Jewell 2015), walls have been a foundational constitutive element in the formation of urban spaces in Beijing. Even today, Beijing remains a dissected city of assorted enclaves—rigorously gated living compounds and enclosed complexes for bureaucracies—segregated by opaque high walls, iron wire fences, and electronic security (Gaubatz 2008). Although some research indicates that Chinese urban inhabitants are accustomed to walled enclosures and hold positive attitudes toward gated living (Wissink et al. 2012), my participants appreciated the sense of openness brought about by this mall:

The spatial structure of the mall, very different from previous buildings, has a sense of openness. . . Openness is a connotation-rich word that would blossom in different forms in people’s hearts: some people would want to open up their emotions; other ones would let their personalities be more open; some would make their states of working open up a little; others might think that they should unleash their erotic desires. (Interview, October 6, 2021)

Third, broader urban experiences beyond the mall also play a key role when users assess the mall’s publicness. Participants often contrasted the mall with other conventionally conceived public spaces, including streets, squares, and many publicly run institutions. Taking the example of public squares, some participants were acutely aware of state power, arguing that the focused function of displaying state supremacy limited accessibility and behavioral freedom in public squares. Conversely, the mall was “truly” public because “its door is open” to more people (Interview, November 13, 2021). Participants did not attempt to prove that the mall was a completely inclusive public space but emphasized that its publicness could not be obliterated because of its entanglement with consumerism:

Shouldn’t we be more critical of spaces unrelated to consumption? Let us say public museums and libraries. They are places that should be more accessible to people. One day, when homeless people can freely enter museums and libraries, we will be more critical of the mall. (Interview, October 4, 2021)

The making of mall publicness is not only rooted in the actuality of how urban inhabitants use the mall but is also inherent in the process of how they interpret their experiences. Critical urban scholars too recognize that people often perceive malls as public spaces (Staeheli and Mitchell 2006), but these everyday interpretations are frequently undervalued by those in intellectually privileged positions (Lefebvre 1991). My participants saw a clear relationship between the mall and the urban publicness, grounded in their experiences of living in Chinese cities in general, and in Beijing in particular: they devalued the commercial function of the mall amid the rapid proliferation of e-retailing in China; they underscored the advantages of the mall’s open-air layout by critically assessing their fragmented spatial experiences caused by “the walled worlds of urban Beijing” (Jewell 2015); they compared the mall with publicly owned spaces that are deeply penetrated by state power. These tactical interpretations mirror and reinforce the role of the mall as an everyday space of publicness in the city.

Conclusion

This article proposes the concept of everyday space of publicness to draw attention to malls as important venues of urban publicness in contemporary China. Based on my fieldwork in Taikoo Li, I have shown how urban inhabitants made the mall an everyday space of publicness through spontaneous social activities, regulatory practices, and revelatory interpretations of their mall experiences. While malls are landscapes partly shaped by capital, defined by commerce, and controlled by private corporations, I argue that mall users, at Taikoo Li and perhaps elsewhere, continuously, informally, and flexibly produce publicness.

The making of Taikoo Li as an everyday space of publicness is contextually situated in the particularities of the mall and its users’ everyday lives. While spontaneous activities may occur in malls worldwide, those at Taikoo Li—such as square dancing—are conditioned by its open-air layout and proximity to local residential compounds. Although the presence of vendors in malls is not unusual in many places around the world, the especially vibrant hive of the informal economy in Taikoo Li arises from local authorities’ ambivalence in regulating street vending in Beijing. Thinking of malls as equivalent to public spaces may be a common phenomenon in many places, but people’s understanding of mall publicness varies by locality; my participants’ tactical interpretation of the publicness of Taikoo Li is rooted in their critical perception of Beijing’s walled-in character. Although acknowledging the situatedness of my ethnography, I anticipate that these findings may also apply to other malls in urban China, especially considering the evident rise of inner-city open-air malls in many cities. However, the applicability to other malls elsewhere requires further exploration with sensitivity to the dynamic relationship between specific spaces, users, and their everyday life worlds.

The concept of everyday space of publicness is formulated as an analytical lens for sharpening sensitivity to the relationship between publicness and urban spaces from the perspective of actual everyday city users. Aligning with the widely recognized everyday turn in social science (de Certeau 1984; Goffman 1956; Lefebvre 1991; Sztompka 2008), my conceptualization embraces lived urban reality as a fundamental domain for investigating the changing nature of public spaces. Rejecting pre-established experience-blind correlations between space and publicness, this concept emphasizes that publicness is made possible through encounters, negotiations, and interactions between nonintimate heterogeneous persons in urban spaces. It thus adds weight to the call for rethinking the relationship between space and publicness in a less normatively rigid way by offering a more pragmatic and contextually sensitive approach (Koch and Latham 2012; Qian 2020).

Empirically, thinking with everyday space of publicness places the question of Chinese urbanism in relation to the changing nature of public spaces and the lived actuality of urbanites’ everyday experiences. Despite macrolevel analyses of Chinese cities’ integration into globalization, a major shortfall of research on urban China is the relative inattention to how urbanites live their everyday lives against such a backdrop (He and Qian 2017, 839). Resonating with Western contexts, capitalist forces, and consumerist cultures progressively influence urban spaces in postreform Chinese cities (Gaubatz 2008; Jewell 2015; Wang and Chen 2018). In this context, everyday space of publicness is especially useful for investigating public life in urban spaces that are not conventionally understood as public, but that are nonetheless used as public, whether publicly owned or privately operated, highly planned or loosely formed, long-lasting or transitory, grand or invisible.

The point of advancing everyday space of publicness is not to blindly praise everyday users’ agency and dismiss critical diagnoses of public spaces; rather, it offers an alternative account of publicness in an urban world that has already undergone massive commercialization. It is not my aim to romanticize everyday spaces of publicness created by urban inhabitants, as not everyone can engage with the making of them in the same manner. For example, ordinary visitors often use the mall as a space for leisure, but vendors have to struggle over the right to the city by using it as a workplace for their precarious livelihoods. The different ways of making mall publicness presented in this article do not exhaust the complexity of everyday space of publicness but should be further examined as they may intersect with classed, raced, and gendered engagements with urban spaces.

Although it cannot offer a full picture of the production and maintenance of urban public spaces in cities, everyday space of publicness can direct us to a more nuanced understanding of the experience, interpretation, and negotiation of publicness by ordinary people in situ. In this sense, it may complement other long-established approaches focused on formal political deliberation and action, and ownership and legislative frameworks. Everyday space of publicness is neither a panacea to counter claims of diminishing urban publicness nor can it answer all challenges public spaces face. Yet, by working with actual spatial users, appreciating their experiences, and listening to their voices, it offers a way to get at the different inflections that public space takes in the variegated urban worlds of everyday life. To attend to everyday space of publicness is to attend to one way that public spirit is maintained in our ever-changing cities.