Fake Cities:
A Mindful Stroll Through America’s New Commercial Space

The Streets at South Point is a retail universe fit into a city set—a facsimile of urban blocks complete with manhole covers, street signs, lamps, pedestrian crossings and brightly colored awnings. Developers say they modeled it on Durham, the closest city, with the additions of corbelled warehouse walls, painted ads and tobacco curing smoke stack. But it would be an idealized copy, at best: the actual city’s downtown includes closed motels, defunct factories and plywood windows warped by rain.
Unlike Durham, this fake city is both populated and profitable. Shoppers pass by open store doors, feeling the rolling waves of air conditioning. And no one seems to care about this greater phenomenon in which historic models stand in for historic cities that are, themselves, disintegrating. This city thrives on its citizens’ television logic, their suspension of disbelief, their excitement in knowing that they will soon be entertained and their nostalgia for a community life they’ve never known.

Susan and I arrived ten minutes ago. She is a professor at Duke University, who I asked to accompany me to the mall to discuss its machinations.
We enter and sit beside a fountain in which bronze statutes of children appear to be playing. “This statute,” I say, “represents freedom for people while they shop. It’s calming effect counteracts the anxiety that all these ads produce.”
“It cools people down from the heightened anxiety of shopping,” Susan replies.
“Right,” I agree. “Developers try to overwhelm shoppers so they will purchase products to return themselves to a sense of stability. But developers don’t want shoppers to leave, so they place these fountains throughout the mall.”
“That’s interesting,” Susan replies. “I suppose the incidental plants are also a way of cooling the red zone of shopping.”
“And they’re exotic,” I say. “They make this place feel like a fantasy land.”
We sit silent for a second and look around. I spot a man in a striped polo shirt photographing store fronts and point him out to Susan.
“Must be undercover surveillance,” she jokes.
A man in a matching shirt walks by.
“He’s dressed like that guy,” I say. “I wonder if they’re part of something…”

Susan and I leave the table and follow the man. He’s in his late thirties, has moussed blonde hair and a muscular gait.
“Excuse me,” Susan asks. “Are you part of this place?”
“No,” he replies, “I am on vacation. My friends and I came from South Africa.”
His name, as we find out later, is Gerhardt Jooste.
“Are you moving to Durham?” Susan inquires.
“No. We are just on a tour.”
“It’s odd that you would come to Durham. We’re not in the center of any map.”
“We’re taking a tour of shopping centers. We’ve been now to 19. We went to Los Angeles, Palm Springs, San Diego, Atlanta and Raleigh-Durham. I’ll tell you, this is the best we’ve seen. We are quite surprised.”
Gerhardt looks toward his friend who has wandered off.
“Do you work in city planning?”
“No, we’ve got a property development company in South Africa.”
“You should go to downtown Durham. A lot of this mall was stylized on decorative aspects that they borrowed from there.”
“I must say, it is something other than your typical closed mall,” he says. “Look at the shop fronts and canopies!”
“Are you going to build malls like this when you get to South Africa?” I ask.
“We’ve been building malls,” he explains. “We’re doing smaller things about a third of this size called Value Malls. We noticed that we don’t really see the service oriented things, like food outlets, here. In South Africa, you’ll get a food retailer as an anchor in a shopping center.”
“Our older style malls always had a grocery store as one of the anchors,” Susan explains. “But more recently we don’t have them. Randall and I were theorizing that’s so shoppers are not faced with the grim reality of shopping to provide for their actual needs in the space where they’re supposed to be shopping for their fantasy life.”
“We were discussing this last night. What happens when people come to shop for fashion? They won’t go groceries? They make separate trips?”
“Those more ordinary needs are not going to be met in a mall like this. The service oriented, again, returns the person to the more daily life reality. A mall like this, even though it looks like a city street, is really meant to cue a more extravagant style of consumption.”
“But it’s all about convenience.”
“No, you’re still living with convenience.”
“We are looking for convenience. We are looking for a shopping experience.”
“No, this is a shopping experience. This is not convenience. Not a single daily life need would be met here.”
Gerhardt looks perplexed. “ But wouldn’t it be nice to have a shopping experience and an extension that is service oriented?”
“Yea, divided by a parking lot,” Susan replies.
We stroll toward the indoor mall’s entrance. Overhead, a mammoth slab of concrete serves to shield shoppers from rain; they pass into the front doors quickly.
“Don’t get into trouble,” I tell Gerhardt, reminding him that this city is private property. “The Visitor Courtesy Code says you can’t take photos inside.”
“I won’t,” he responds. “We’ve been thrown out about ten times. I think what we’ve seen outside is so nice.”

Susan and I walk inside. Map stands of rosewood veneer feature the engraved shapes of crop circles. We proceed into the central rotunda in which elevators crisscross the enormous space. People can be seen walking at every eye-level and in every direction. Sound projects and dies like noise around an indoor pool.
“We should stop by this store called Build-a-Bear,” I say.
“That’s where you make your teddy bear,” Susan asks.
I nod and we get on the escalator.
When we arrive at the store we notice a large mechanized bear wearing a thimble. It is rocking its head back and forth and appears to be captured in a cylindrical glass case. Beside it, a man is standing in a doorway. He has a buzz cut, khaki trousers, and name tag reading “Blair.” He is holding a teddy to his chest.
“How are you today,” he asks.
“Hi,” Susan and I reply in unison.
“Have you been to Build a Bear before?”
“Um, no,” we say.
“Well, we have a selection of about 30 different bears. They start at ten and go up to 25 dollars. You just pick them out of the bins. And basically you just circle around. We have a Hear Me section where you can check out little sound chips like this.”
Blair squeezes his bear. It emits a he-he-he laugh. He continues: “If you want, you can put one inside their paw. After that we have a Stuff Me section, where we actually stuff them. It’s really neat. You can stuff them, then go back to the corner where we have all kinds of clothes. Then there’s a letter on the computer. You fill that out and it prints a birth certificate. Finally, your animal goes home in a little cardboard box shaped like a house.”
“Wow,” I reply, astonished.
“Wowee,” Susan says. “We’re going to walk around and look at the process. This is amazing.”
The store is decorated like a kids version of a sewing shop. It is filled with oversized yellow, red and blue ratchets, gears and zippers. The company motto, “Where Best Friends Are Made,” wraps around the registers. I walk by the bins of teddy pelts and approach a line of shoppers. They are standing in front of the Stuff Me section.
A teenage boy watches Marianna, a Build a Bear employee, take his teddy and place it over a stainless steel cylinder resembling an exhaust pipe. White fluff shoots through a clear tube into the animal. Marianna wiggles the fur over the rim. The process makes the staccato sounds of a whip cream can. When she finishes, Marianna gestures toward the boy’s hand, which contains a red satin heart. “Rub the heart together,” she tells him. “Make a wish and give it a kiss.”
The boy brings it to his mouth, kisses it and hands it to Marianna. She places it inside the bear and passes it to another employee, Amanda, who sews up its back. I walk away and find Susan in the Dress Me section.
“Well, this is a popular store,” she says. “Now I see how they pay their rent. Look at these leathers. You can have your own little…”
“Bad ass bear,” I interrupt.
“Oh my gosh.”
“They go home in their own little house,” I say, pointing to the cardboard shacks the size of grocery bags.
“Well, I have lots I can say about that,” she says, starting toward the door.

Outside we pass through a stream of shoppers. Susan turns to me excitedly, “The idea of cross-species birthing, united with assembly line, and finished off with consumption-- buying the proper attire!”
I laugh. “What would Marx say about this?”
She thinks then nods. “Well, in Build a Bear, we’re purchasing the aura of production. Also the sense that making it is also birthing it is a mixing of genres. It’s fascinating that a child who will never work on an assembly line gets to experience what that might have been like. Yet, in fact, the stuff out of which the bear is built is probably made by real children in sweatshops somewhere.”

We leave Build a Bear and walk onto a bridgeway where three women are seated, quiet and staring, on a bench. We look over the safety rail at the lower level kiosks and stores. “When you stand here and look at the flow of people,” Susan says, “it’s almost as if each one of us in this environment becomes an item on an assembly line.”
I ask her to explain.
“Well, I’m still thinking about Build a Bear, where you really do participate in assembly line production. In there we are meant to produce, or at least assemble, a product. Here you are meant to assemble your consumption via all these images. I mean, look at this American Eagle.”
A poster hanging to our left depicts a woman crowd surfing. Her exposed belly is centrally framed while teems of shirtless boys hold her up.
“They devote a huge amount of window space to this large photo that sells the image of people having fun. If we looked at other photos, I think we would see they really are selling moods, experiences and qualities that are less tangible than clothes. It’s as if purchasing these clothes could make you have an array of feelings that you’re not now having.”
A Polynesian hut décor, to our right, frames large posters of teenagers in beach scenes. “It works with the mall,” I add. “If you want to get out of here, and you see a photo depicting freedom, you might purchase the product to substitute your leaving.”
Susan nods and we walk on. “Have you noticed that this mall is structured in a gradual bend,” I ask. “That it makes the shopper keep walking to find the end?”
“Yes. It’s an optical illusion.”
“And this whole arc is filled with bridges. It’s like we’re in a Mad Max and the Thunderdome living facility.”
Susan ponders then attempts an explanation: “In these enclosed malls, architecture connects with time. And it’s about forgetting it. Have you seen anything to remind you what time it is? This kind of architecture, which features a lot of bridgeway, reinforces the notion that you are in a state of suspension.”
“You know, the storefronts also confuse time and place,” I say. “Look how many types of historic architecture are represented. Doesn’t that look like a storefront from Florence?”
To our right, a shop features a canopied, old-world concrete façade. Charlestonian and Bauhaus styles, with hurricane dormers and rigid grids, adorn the adjacent stores.
Susan nods. “All connection to a real environment, all pretense of the down home, evaporates. Outside we might have had a Main Street—a kind of place that reminds us that once we shopped in an open air, urban environment. In here, these shops might have different logo labels at their entry ports, but the entire environment has imploded into a hyperspace of global merchandise.”
“What is hyperspace?”
“Well, where we are joined to the globalized network of production and consumption. Where we no longer have a demographic, or a sense of topography. Where we no longer have a here here. Where we could be anywhere.”

Susan and I walk toward an escalator and, beside it, a statute of a child with her hand outstretched toward the moving rails. She scares disembarking shoppers, who presumably turn to see only her grinning innocence. Riding down, Susan and I notice surveillance cameras hidden amid track lighting. We exit the escalator and walk into a yellow and white tile hallway connecting the mall to the bathrooms. At the end of the hallway, three windows look onto two men sitting at a curved desk. Above them a banner reads, The Office of Public Safety.
The men are looking at various screens. One depicts an officer talking to a disgruntled shopper in the parking lot. Another depicts people strolling through the mall. Three monitors show Susan and myself, from the back, looking through the window.
“Why would they have so many angled on the alleyway to the bathroom,” Susan wonders.
The man on the right rolls his chair in front of a screen, reaches for a joystick and pans the food court. He can magnify the image enough to see a single person chewing.
“Wow! He can pan. It’s a joystick. And zoom! Look at that!” I say.
“Right, I guess the place where people would mingle like a food court is where they really have people watching.”
After seeing an officer disappear behind an unmarked door, we leave the tile hallway. We walk outside, sit on a bench and face the mall.
“Well, the first thing I noticed is that down the alleyway to the shits is the security,” Susan says. “And all of a sudden another aspect of this place is revealed: There is a whole backside we’re not seeing. As in Disney World, you never see the work that keeps it going. You don’t see the cleaning. That’s all done at night, after the visitors have gone home. There’s this erasure of work. Yet it’s oddly manifested in the work of surveillance, which you’re allowed to see.”
“It’s intimidation,” I say. “The security confronts the inquiry of how this place works. The site for understanding your environment is tucked away like all the other sites of necessity—bathroom, food court, children’s area. Everything but consumptive fantasy has been put in the margins.”
Susan shifts in her seat and replies. “It’s like the South African said. He was basically asking, Where is real, daily life? Well, it’s in these corners and odd little manifestations like that. Otherwise, none of this is about real, daily life.”