Shopping Malls and Social Democracy: Victor Gruen’s Postwar Campaign for Conscientious Consumption in American Suburbia

Abstract

The Viennese architect and urban planner Victor Gruen, who emigrated to the United States in 1938, is best known as the inventor of the suburban shopping center and the downtown pedestrian mall. His original, idealistic vision had much in common with the Social Democrats’ municipal housing complexes of 1920s “Red Vienna,” which were organized around central courtyards. Gruen’s idea came to fruition with Detroit’s Northland in 1954. A paradigmatic shopping center designed as a pedestrian-only community space, it was a new downtown for the sprawling suburbs. Northland was a triumph of rational planning during the Cold War, when such efforts at social engineering smacked of communism and threatened “free enterprise.” The liberty of American-style consumption, it turned out, required the rational planning of a Viennese socialist.