Page 42 - The Disneyization of Society

THEMING

Minneapolis and West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta exemplify this feature.
As Gottdiener points out, Mall of America takes America as its master theme both
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through its name and the outside façade which is decorated with stars and
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stripes. In addition, areas within the mall are individually themed. Cohn, quoting
it would seem from a publicity leaflet about Mall of America, notes that
South Avenue was ‘chic sophisticated … cosmopolitan shopping and flair’; North Garden ‘lushly
landscaped … a park-like setting with gazebos, trellises and natural skylights’; West Market ‘remi-
niscent of a European railway station’; and East Broadway a honky tonk, all neon and chrome. 64

Cohn also observes that the muzak changes according to which area one is in. As
with all theming, the mall designers call upon accessible imagery to project the
kinds of impressions they seek to convey. In West Edmonton Mall, one encounters
arcades modelled on the boulevards of Paris and on Bourbon Street in New Orleans
along with the conventional juxtapositions associated with North American malls.
While the Mall of America and West Edmonton Mall are unusual in their size and
the numbers of visitors they attract, so that it is important not to generalize too
much from them, many of the features they exhibit can be seen in much smaller
malls in the United States and elsewhere. Adjacent to Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas is
a mall called the Forum Shops where the largely upscale shops and restaurants are
surrounded by signs of ancient Rome. This is one of the most successful malls in the
United States in terms of retail sales per square foot. It has become a tourist attrac-
tion in its own right by virtue of its audio-animatronic statues and the clever ceil-
ing, which is a sky that changes from night to day and back again. This playing with
time in part adds to the attraction but can also be viewed as related to the way in
which casinos like Caesar’s Palace disorientate by not having clocks and windows
so that visitors/players are not reminded what time of the day it is. Other examples
of themed malls include the Borgata, a Scottsdale open air shopping mall ‘set down
in the flat Arizona desert, reinterprets the medieval Tuscan hill town of San
Gimignano with piazza and scaled-down towers (made of real Italian bricks)’. 65
The Mills Corporation has become well-known for building out-of-town malls
with distinctive themes. Opry Mills in Nashville has distinct areas: ‘When a
Nashville consumer crosses from the “American classic” neighborhood into the
more upscale “fashion” neighborhood, bright lights give way to softer lighting,
top-40 tunes are replaced with classical music, the floors become carpeted, homey
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rocking chairs and garden benches are displaced by upholstered chairs.’ Arundel
Mills in Baltimore features a number of ‘neighbourhoods’ each of which denotes
different aspects of the city or the state of Maryland: Charm City, Baltimore’s
nickname, has simulated row houses and marble steps, the Ocean City boardwalk,
and Chesapeake marshes along with turtles as seats and hovering dragonflies.
Similarly, the MetroCentre in Gateshead in the north east of England contains
themed shopping areas like the Mediterranean Village. 67 When we look at the
Trafford Centre just outside Manchester in the north west of England, we find what
the writer of a Times article referred to as turning ‘shopping into a Disneyesque filmic