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The Malling of America: Travels in the United States of Shopping

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Between 1961 when Jane Jacobs and Lewis Mumford published respectively watershed critiques of Modernist urban renewal and suburbia, and 1985 when Bill Kowinski wrote "The Malling of America," almost nothing was written about the fiasco of suburban land development in America. Kowinski's excellent book re-started a national discussion about the frantic enterprise of turning America into a parking lot from sea to shining sea. It also alerted a sleepwalking citizenry (who had taken to calling themselves "consumers") to the dangers of privatizing what had traditionally been the public realm of the marketplace.
This seminal book is now republished with a fresh introduction, and not a moment too soon because America stands fully malled at the brink of an era when the infrastructure of our automobile utopia is liable to fail catastrophically. Parents should put down "Harry Potter" and read this to their children, because to them will fall the task of the de-malling of America.

_The Malling of America_ is a cutting, critical look at the consumerist nature of modern-day American society as it manifests itself in that most insidious, most ubiquitous of institutions, the shopping mall. Kowinski studies how malls operate, from their land appropriation practices to their mandatory tenant hours of operation, to give an intelligent, in-depth perspective on consumer and corporate habits in the US.