Lifestyle centers, the next boom and bust after shopping malls? Governance, public-private partnerships, and Guy Debord's spectacle in Dallas-Fort Worth

Abstract

The boom and bust cycle of shopping malls has had profound repercussions for U.S. cities. Now, lifestyle centers are ascending, and this latest form of retail development is more costly than the development of classic suburban-style shopping malls. Concerns regarding the sustainability of lifestyle centers are highlighted in this article, which is a critical political economic assessment of how the emergence of lifestyle centers and the boom and bust cycle of shopping malls diverge and converge. This article uses qualitative methods in a case study of shopping malls and lifestyle centers in the Dallas-Fort Worth (DFW) metropolitan region, onboarding a political economic understanding of creative destruction, neoliberal governance strategies, and drawing on Guy Debord's notion of ‘the society of the spectacle.’ It is concluded that the boom and bust cycle of retail development is part of the continual production and degradation of spectacle-(re)enforcing built environments within advanced capitalism, and that stopping boom and bust retail trends requires a radical reorientation of planning, design, and policy-making toward new spatial ideologies informed by truly participatory community engagement.