*As a prologue to my little rant about Rick Caruso’s lifestyle centers, a reminder: With Black Friday fast upon us, remember that it is also Buy Nothing Day 2008. Join in on an action, or create your own, but most of all BUY NOTHING.*
Last Monday I attended (for stupid work reasons) an awards dinner that honored Rick Caruso and The Walt Disney Company for demonstrating “exceptional contributions to positive economic development in the region.” The Beverly Hilton teemed with well-groomed real estate men in dark suits (and the sparkly, sparkly women who love them) discussing the economy, the lack of development financing, and the vision and accomplishments of Rick Caruso. Sitting at my dinner table listening to the host wax poetic about Caruso and The Walt Disney Corporation, I had the following (grammatically incorrect) twitter outburst:
Ohmigodthisagainsteverythingibelieveinyikes. 9:20 PM Nov 17th from TwitterBerry
Rick Caruso is best known to Los Angelenos for his developments The Grove and Americana at Brand, as well as for briefly considering (but then abondoning the idea of) running for mayor. The city streets ring with lauds and praises of “Carusostyle” – “high-quality shopping malls, which he [Caruso] contends are more akin to retail streets on a par with the great piazzas of Europe” – and institutions and publications from the Urban Land Institute (2) to Los Angeles Magazine (2) emphasize his influence on architecture, design, and the city of L.A generally.
Much like the awards dinner I attended, while Los Angeles Magazine pays tribute to Caruso and his lifestyle centers, it associates Caruso with Disneyland: the editor comments that more people visited The Grove than Disneyland in 2006; the magazine describes Caruso’s lifestyle centers as “open-air facsimiles of storybook Main Streets.” Although intended to be a positive association in the foregoing contexts, the pairing of Caruso with Disneyland unwittingly highlights what I despise about Caruso’s developments, what makes him and his lifestyle centers “against everything i believe in yikes”: the progressive Disneyfication of city life, of city experience, of human experience.
Quick and dirty look at a European retail street (i.e., why Rick Caruso is insane): Passeig del Born is part of the Born area of the city. Although I haven’t been there for a couple of years, I have been there many, many times – Bar Rosal, one of my favorite places in Barcelona to sit and sip a coffee or drink a beer and eat green olives, is there – and I have watched it go from a quiet retail street to a trendy high-end fashion retail area. And even as a trendy retail area, it’s a “democratic” space – there is nothing blocking pedestrian access day or night. Cars have very little access, to be sure, as it is part of the old city constructed long before cars, with narrow windy roads and a beautiful emphasis on foot traffic (although Passeig del Born is more of a large open square). However, it is part of the city. To get there, you only have to turn the corner from one street to the next. You do not enter into an obviously defined private area. While people eat and drink at the clusters of outdoor tables, a tide of humanity washes back and forth: beggars, buskers, skaters, grandmothers, university students, natural gas vendors, tourists. One can even enjoy the famous Barcelona graffiti – of which one of my favorite Born examples was a single light blue stenciled word: “fucksion” – (although due to tighter regulation this is sadly a disappearing art form).
Compare this to Caruso’s European-style retail street, The Grove.* Like Disneyland, you park in a designated parking area outside. Like Disneyland, you enter into a sanitized, policed simulation of “real” life.** However, unlike Disneyland, and what makes it more sinister, is that there is no ticket required, no price of admission. This begins to blend the lines between public and private space in dangerous ways, in ways that allow unthinking, uncritical shoppers to prefer the comforts of this entirely undemocratic, not public space to the “vagaries” of true public space – panhandlers, exposure to other “lesser” classes of human beings and/or human activity that challenges the comfortable world these people gather about themselves like protective armor.
What is truly horrifying about this, however, is that it is catching on. Victoria Gardens in Rancho Cucamonga – the address of which is even North Mainstreet, one of the streets within the development – further blurs the lines between public and private by including a community cultural center. LA Live, too, functions similarly to these lifestyle centers – its buildings face inward upon each other around false public spaces, so the crowds moving within the giant entertainment developments rarely crowd the truely accessible streets of downtown L.A.***
Okay, I have to stop here – I’m even starting to bore myself. But to wrap up this discussion, I will provide for you three positive actions you can take that are in direct opposition to shopping / participating in this consumer-driven simulacrum of public space:
- Reclaim the Streets. In Recipes for Disaster, CrimethInc. describes the guerrilla action it calls Reclaim the Streets. A group of individuals blocks off an intersection or a part of a city street and uses the area for a street fair, or for enjoyment, interaction, exchange.
- Midnight Ridazz / Midnight Ridazz-style bike rides. A form of reclaiming the streets, most of the rides born of Midnight Ridazz challenge the ideology behind lifestyle shopping centers. Once again I will quote a friend of mine:
Fuck politics!
Fuck appeals to the authorities for more lenient terms of enslavement!
We are forging a new society, right now!
Every Midnight Ridazz ride, every Tren Way ride, every Sins and Sprockets ride, every C.R.A.N.K. MOB ride is a political ride.
Why? Because it’s a public demonstration of collective happiness without consumerism, without structure, without hierarchies. It’s a demonstration that anarchy is possible AND fun.
- Go to the NELA Food Not Bombs benefit this Saturday, November 29.
If you got this far, thank you for reading. If I were the type to cause trouble, I would go cause it now.
*I have only one experience with Americana at Brand: Soon after it opened, the boyfriend and I went to the theater there to see a movie. Gathered just outside its perimeter, guarding the boundary between it and genuine public space, were crowds of Glendale police. The only time I will ever enter Americana at Brand is when I finally get up enough courage to bomb through it on my bike…which absolutely must and will happen soon.
**I’m not going to get into Baudrillard (2) here even though I would like to. I have already blown past tl;dr.
***To the extent the streets of downtown L.A. are truely accessible. Of course, see The City of Quartz for what was for me a life-changing discussion of city space.
