Abstract
ABSTRACTThe many studies that see shopping malls as places of power, control and exclusion have often neglected the potential of malls as places of encounters. Drawing on ethnographic data from the divided cities of Johannesburg in South Africa and Mostar in Bosnia–Herzegovina, we examine the ways in which urban dwellers who enter the mall from a marginalised position – poor black urban dwellers at a regional, middle class and white-dominated mall in Johannesburg and Bosniak city dwellers at a mall located in the Croat part of Mostar – use the mall, what kind of relations they build to others and how they rework boundaries of race, class, religion and ethnicity at the mall. Rather than being spaces that strengthen and reproduce centre–margins relations, urban dwellers appropriate them as places where these relations become reworked.
Highlights
Shopping malls have attracted a lot of interest among academics
We focus on two such malls – Greenstone Shopping Centre in Johannesburg and Rondo Shopping Centre (Tržni Centar Rondo) in Mostar – and we inquire how urban dwellers who enter the mall from a marginalised position – poor black urban dwellers at a regional, middle class and white-dominated mall in Johannesburg, Bosniak city dwellers at a mall located in the Croat section of Mostar – interact in this ‘foreign territory’
Based on the ethnography of users of a South African and a Bosnian mall, we argue that shopping malls should not be seen as disconnected enclaves, but rather as spaces which – entangled with many other spaces of the city – contribute to the construction of self and other as well as to the reassessment of social boundaries in the city
Summary
Shopping malls have attracted a lot of interest among academics. One can delineate two opposing approaches towards malls in academia: the one strand sees malls as materialisations of the globalised economy, of globalised consumptionscapes and of ever greedy real estate capitalism; they are seen as spaces which only serve desires of the elites, exclude others and increase urban fragmentation and segregation. In the relevant literature there is a general perception that shopping malls are spaces of exclusion, in both Mostar and Johannesburg marginalised urban dwellers venture to the malls and participate, in one way or the other, in the forms of sociality emerging there.
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