Sic transit - the itinerant sociability of the malls

Abstract

Admitting the interactional richness of public space, this paper examines mall’s contemporary streams of circulation as an expression of sociality. Far from being an amorphous crowd or an unpretentious set of individual motions, we consider these parades as an expression of a need for a gregariousness which assumes a nomadic or an itinerant form. We will argue malls may today represent an anthropological structure that grounds aggregation around space as a basis to sociality. What distinguishes the roaming sociality is the crossing of space and the physical materiality to only transcend it. More than consumption or travelling space, these flows appear to answer, in view of urban dullness, to the creation of communal forms of social bonding.