The postwar American shopping mall projects of Austrian émigré Victor Gruen aimed to create not merely ideal commercial zones but complete, insular communities that would serve as templates in the (re)construction of an ideal capitalist society. These utopian sites were shaped as much by cold war concerns as by capitalist dreams, and as a result, they came to highlight tensions between the imperatives of commerce (which made malls possible) and the cooperative ones at the root of much utopian thought. This is seen in a close study of Gruen’s “shopper’s paradise,” Southdale—the first fully enclosed, temperature-controlled mall.
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