[2007.12.19]Birth, death and shopping 生死与“购”

Oddly, this most suburban American invention was supposed to evoke a European city centre. Hence Southdale’s density and its atrium, where shoppers were expected to sit and debate over cups of coffee, just as they do in the Piazza San Marco or the Place Dauphine. Gruen exiled cars, which he thought noisy and anti-social, to the outside of his mall. Most contemporary critics thought Gruen had succeeded in bringing urbanity to the suburbs. Southdale was “more like downtown than downtown itself”, claimed the Architectural Record. Another asserted, in a rare example of journalistic hyperbole that turned out to be absolutely right, that the indoor shopping mall was henceforth “part of the American way”.
令人匪夷所思的是，这最具郊区特质的美国发明据说塑造了一个欧洲城市中心。从此，南谷购物中心车水马龙，其核心店也聚集了很多顾客，她们品着咖啡，悠闲地坐在这里侃大山，此情此景不得不让人联想到圣马可广场（威尼斯的市中心广场）和亲王广场（巴黎）。格伦视汽车乃嘈杂反社会之物，所以他把停车场设在购物商城之外。大多数同时代的评论家认为，格伦已成功地把都市风格融入了郊区。《建筑学档案》杂志称南谷“比市区更像市区”。另有断言称室内购物商城此后将是“美国生活方式的一部分”，这一罕见的颇具新闻夸张手法的评论后来被证实是完全正确的。

As Jeffrey Hardwick explains in his excellent biography, Gruen did not believe his creation would take business away from downtown shopping districts. He saw it as an adjunct to them. If indoor shopping centres harmed any businesses, Gruen dearly hoped it would be the fast-food stands and tacky strip malls that were sprouting like weeds along main roads. Southdale’s first tenants shared this sanguine view. When it opened it was filled not with national chains but with second branches of downtown merchants.
杰弗里•哈德维克在其优秀的传记中解释，格伦并不认为他的杰作会夺走市内主要商业区的生意，而把它们看作是辅助品。如果室内购物中心真的损害了任何商家的利益话，格伦倒希望是快餐摊和褴褛的步行街，他们杂草丛生般地沿着主街萌芽蔓延。当南谷购物中心开业时，蜂拥而至的并非市区贸易商们的全国连锁店而是其第二分店。南谷第一批承租商分享了这一红火的场面。

By the 1970s malls were proliferating. Gruen toured America promoting his invention. Malls began to open in Europe too—where, Gruen was presumably surprised to learn, they were seen as quintessentially American. At home, two developments speeded their growth. The first was a change in the tax code which allowed investors to write down a large proportion of a new building’s cost as a loss. That made malls much more profitable. The second was a widespread property-tax revolt that deprived local governments of their most reliable source of income. Desperate, they tried to lure businesses that they could milk for taxes. They were particularly keen on shopping malls.
1970年代，购物商城如雨后春笋般纷纷涌现。格伦周游美国推行新策。购物商城也在欧洲扎根发展，并被看作是美国精粹，估计格伦对此一定会万分惊讶。在美国本土，两个发展因素加速了购物商城的扩增。第一个因素是税收法则的改革，它允许投资者把较大比例的新建筑成本记为损耗，这使得购物中心更加有利可图。第二因素是一次分布广泛的不动产税抗议，这次抗议使地方政府丧失了他们最可靠的收入来源。绝望之下，地方政府设法招商引资以便从中获税。他们尤其渴望引入购物商城。

Tribes of the mall
购物商城的族群
By the early 1980s indoor shopping centres were woven tightly into American culture. New cuisines (the term is perhaps too grand) emerged in them, thanks to chains like Cinnabon and Panda Express, which did not exist outside malls. They began to swell to the point of absurdity. Canada’s West Edmonton Mall, which opened in 1982, has an ice-skating rink, a pool with sea-lions and an indoor bungee jump. The Mall of America, in Minnesota, has three rollercoasters and more than 500 shops arranged in “streets” designed to appeal to different age groups. Every morning it opens early to accommodate a group of “mall walkers” who trudge around its 0.57-mile perimeter for exercise.
1980年代初期，室内购物中心已牢固地融入了美国文化。新的烹饪风格（或许大词小用）从中脱颖而出，这多亏了像肉桂卷和熊猫快餐之类的连锁店，他们离开购物中心根本无法生存。他们开始扩增到近似荒唐的地步。1982年开业的加拿大西埃德蒙顿商场，拥有滑冰场、海狮水池和室内蹦极。位于明尼苏达州的美国摩尔购物中心内设三个过山车，500多家商店密布商业街，用以吸引不同的年龄群体。每天早晨，商城开门很早，给早起来此遛弯的人提供了便利，他们围绕商场0.57英里的周边散步晨练。

Artists and urban anthropologists began to note the appearance of mall-based tribes. Most celebrated—and lampooned—were the Valley girls who congregated in California’s Glendale Galleria. Frank Zappa’s then-teenage daughter, Moon Unit, wrote a hit song that captured their argot (“ohmigod!”, “no biggie”, “grody to the max”, “total space cadet”) and praised the Galleria for having “like, all these, like, really great shoe stores”. Mall-oriented films followed, spreading the Valley girls’ culture like spores in the wind.
艺术家和城市人类学家开始关注一类围绕商城生活的族群的出现。其中，最著名并颇具个人嘲讽意味的是山谷女孩，她们聚集在加州格伦达风雨商业街廊一带。著名摇滚乐人弗兰克•扎帕十多岁的女儿Moon Unit（月球单位）写过一首很成功的歌曲，歌词中引用了这一族群的很多暗语（天啊、没什么大不了的、完全、完全不切实际），并赞颂了格伦达风雨商业街廊拥有“像，这些，像，真正棒的鞋店”。以购物商城为导向的电影也紧随其后，犹如风中的孢子散播着山谷女孩一族的文化。

Just as the onward march of malls began to seem unstoppable, though, things began to go wrong. In just a few years they turned from temples of consumption to receptacles for social problems. The changing attitude to shopping malls can be seen in two films, both of which, appropriately, are to cinema what Panda Express is to the Chinese culinary tradition.
正当购物商城前进的步伐开始似乎不可停止一样，事态开始变糟。没过几年，它们因众多的社会问题从消费的殿堂变成了储存货物的仓库。购物商城急转直下的态势从两部影片中可见一斑，恰当地说，两部电影之于电影院，如同熊猫快餐之于中国烹饪传统。

George Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead”, released in 1978, is ostensibly a story about a group of people struggling to survive in a world taken over by flesh-eating zombies. But it is also a commentary on the lurid appeal of shopping malls, which were then multiplying quickly. That becomes clear a third of the way through the film, when the humans must decide where to take refuge. They rule out the cities, which are thick with monsters. Yet they need food, water and fuel, which are hard to find in the wilderness. They decide to head for a suburban shopping mall.
乔治•罗梅罗1978年发行的电影《僵尸的黎明》，表面上，讲述了一群人在一个被食人僵尸控制的世界中挣扎生存的故事。但它也是对购物商城可怕的吸引力的实况报道，此后购物商城迅速在各地涌现。当人们必须决定何处庇身时，贯穿影片的第三条路线彰显无疑。他们首先排除城市，因为那里有僵尸聚集。但他们需要食物、水和燃料，这些在荒野中无处可寻。于是他们决定前往郊区的购物中心。

There are a few zombies at the mall when the refugees arrive, staggering about aimlessly in a fashion familiar to Christmas shoppers. As one character explains, the monsters seem to have been drawn there by instinct: the mall was clearly an important place in their lives. Most of the humans are similarly intoxicated by the variety of goods on display. That worries the film’s heroine, Fran. “I’m afraid,” she says. “You’re hypnotized by this place, all of you. It’s all so bright and neatly wrapped that you don’t see that it can be a prison.” Nonsense, replies her boyfriend: “We got everything we need right here!” The rest of the film bears out the horror-movie dictum that nervous young women are always right.
当幸存者来到购物中心时，已有几个僵尸，看起来像是圣诞节的采购者，在此漫无目的地游荡。一个特写说明，这些僵尸似乎出于本能被吸引到这里：很明显，购物商城在他们的生活中意义非凡。多数人也同样陶醉在琳琅满目的展示商品中。这让影片女主人公弗兰焦虑不安，“恐怕你们所有人都被这个地方迷晕了吧，这包装地如此堂皇与华美，使你们都没意识到这可能是一个监狱。”弗兰说。她男朋友回答说：“胡说，我们在此能得到我们想要的一切！”电影的剩余部分证实了这部恐怖电影的格言：不安的年青女人总是对的。

In 1995 a much gloomier vision of the shopping mall appeared. If “Dawn of the Dead” suggested malls were monstrously appealing, Kevin Smith’s “Mallrats” depicted them simply as magnets for dysfunctional youth. The film chronicles the mundane adventures of four young men who come to a New Jersey mall to hang out, complain about their girlfriends and annoy security guards. The shopkeepers loathe them because, as the manager of Fashionable Male, a clothes shop, puts it, they lack a “shopping agenda”. Indeed, they lack much of an agenda at all. In Mr Smith’s mall everybody is a kind of zombie. As the film’s tagline explained: “They’re not there to work. They’re not there to shop. They’re just there.”
1995年一个描写购物中心的更加阴郁的影像问世。如果说《僵尸的黎明》暗示了商城的魔幻魅力，那么凯文•史密斯的《耍酷一族》则把购物中心简单地描绘成吸引心智不全的年轻人的磁铁。影片记录了四个年轻人平凡的冒险经历，他们来新泽西州的购物中心消磨时间，抱怨他们的女朋友和烦人的门卫。店主都很讨厌他们，因为，正如“时尚男性”服装店的经理所说的，他们没有“购物计划”。的确，他们完全没有计划。在史密斯先生描绘的商城中，每个人都是僵尸。犹如影片结束语所解释的：“他们在那儿既不工作，也不购物，只是在那儿呆着。”

By the 1990s malls were in trouble. Having bred too quickly, they began to cannibalize each other. (Turn left out of Southdale’s car park and the first building you pass is another shopping mall.) Discount shops, factory-outlet stores and category killers like Toys “R” Us ate into their profits. As middle-aged shoppers began to disappear, the teenagers who had inhabited malls from the beginning became more noticeable, which only made things worse. In 1998 Good Housekeeping ran a story entitled “Danger at the Mall”. Indoor shopping malls are now so out of favour that not one will be built in America before 2009 at the earliest, according to the International Council of Shopping Centres.
到了1990年代，购物商城变得举步维艰。由于增生太快，购物商城开始互相残杀。（从南谷购物中心停车场出来，左转，路过的第一个大楼就是另一家购物商城。）折扣店、厂家直销店和像玩具反斗城这样的品类杀手吞食了它们的利润。随着中年顾客开始消失，住在商业街的青少年开始倍受关注，使得形势更加糟糕。1998年，《好管家》曾策划过一个专题故事，名叫“商城危机四伏”。从国际购物中心委员会获悉，室内购物中心时下如此失宠，最起码在2009年之前，美国不会再建。

One reason for the malls’ problems is that the suburbs have changed. When the Southdale shopping centre opened on the outskirts of Minneapolis, the suburbs were almost entirely white and middle-class. Whites were fleeing a wave of new arrivals from the South (the black population of Minneapolis rose by 155% between 1940 and 1960). Although Gruen could not bear to admit it, his invention appealed to those who wanted downtown’s shops without its purported dangers. These days, in Minneapolis as in much of America, the ethnic drift is in the opposite direction. The suburbs are becoming much more racially mixed while the cities fill up with hip, affluent whites. As a result, suburban malls no longer provide a refuge from diversity.
购物商城出现问题的原因之一是郊区已经发生了改变。南谷购物中心在明尼苏达州市郊开业时，郊区几乎完全是白人和中产阶级。白人正在逃避黑人从南部拥进的浪潮（1940至1960年之间明尼苏达州的黑人增长了155%）。尽管格伦不愿承认，他的杰作确实吸引了那些想来市区购物的黑人，他们并非像谣传的那样危险。那时，明尼阿波利斯像美国多数城市一样，黑白人种以相反的方向转移。郊区种族越来越混杂，而城市则聚集了时髦富裕的白人。从种族多样性的角度来说，郊区商业中心不再为人们提供生活避难所。

So many malls have died or are dying that a new hobby has appeared: amateur shopping-mall history. Like many esoteric pursuits, this has been facilitated by the internet. Websites such as Deadmalls.com and Labelscar.com collect pictures of weedy car parks and empty food courts and try to explain how once-thriving shopping centres began to spiral downward. Some of the recollections are faintly ironic or gloating. Yet the strongest note is anguish. Implausibly, these online histories reveal the deep emotional connections that people can establish with malls.
那么多的购物中心都已经英雄迟暮，致使一个新的业余爱好已经出现：购物商城野史记。像好多神秘的追求嗜好一样，互联网也已经为此提供了便利。诸如逝去商城网（Deadmalls,com）和标签汽车网（Labelscar.com）之类的网站专门收集野草丛生的停车场照片和人去楼空的餐饮街廊照片，并设法解释曾繁华一时的购物中心逐渐衰败的过程。一些往事颇具讽刺意味或又让人沾沾自喜。但是，最强烈的音符还是痛苦。难以置信，这些在线的历史故事揭露着人们与购物商城建立的浓厚的情感纽带。

One of the most touching is a website devoted to Lakehurst mall near Chicago, which was demolished in 2004. Prodded by a local journalist, women and a few men write in with memories of back-to-school shopping trips, ear piercings, first jobs at Cinnabon and Orange Julius, early dates and even marriage proposals. Many are bereft at the mall’s demolition, as though suffering the death of a pet. “You don’t realise how much you miss something until it is gone,” writes one. Others are almost apologetic: “If only we knew what we had, we would never have strayed to other malls.”
其中，最动人的一个便是专门为紧邻芝加哥的湖之洲商场制作的网站，这家商场于2004年拆毁。由当地一位新闻记者发起，众多女性和些许男性在网站上写下了当年在湖之洲购物商城的生活情景，重返校园购物旅行、打耳洞、在肉桂卷和鲜榨果汁店的首份工作、早恋和甚至求婚等众多往事皆历历在目。随着商场的拆毁，好多随之失去，如同痛失爱宠。有人写到：“直到它消逝的那一天，你才会明白你有多么怀念它。”一些人几乎用忏悔的口气说：“如果我们早知道过去拥有的一切，我们肯定不会另寻她欢。”

As shopping malls decline, they sometimes come to resemble the civic centres that Gruen intended them to be. Attracted by cheap rents, community groups and police stations move in. On a trip to one of Gruen’s creations, the now-desolate Carousel Mall in San Bernardino, your correspondent encountered a group of middle-aged Mexicans studying for the American citizenship test.
由于购物商城的衰败，它们有时候开始模仿市中心，这刚好符合格伦的本意。被其便宜的房租吸引，社区团体和警察局迁居到此。当游览格伦作品之一，圣贝纳迪诺市如今人烟荒芜的卡罗塞勒商城时，通讯记者遇到一群中年墨西哥人正在学习美国公民入籍测试。

Not all malls have suffered from competition and the suburbs’ transformation. Some have prospered by appealing to growing ethnic-minority groups. American malls are courting middle-class Latinos by adding butchers’ shops and, in some cases, by decking themselves out to resemble Mexican villages. La Gran Plaza, in the Texas town of Fort Worth, lays on mariachi and reggaeton acts and is building a rodeo. Other malls changed their clientele without adjusting their look. Brent Cross shopping centre, one of Britain’s earliest malls, now contains shops staffed by second- and third-generation Asians selling to new arrivals from eastern Europe.
竞争和郊区的变革并没有让所有的商城都惨遭不幸。通过吸引渐增的少数民族群体，一些商城依然繁荣昌盛。美国商城正向中产阶层的拉丁美洲人屡献殷勤，商场增设屠宰店，有些装潢地像墨西哥乡村。德克萨斯州沃斯堡城的La Gran购物广场，设置了墨西哥流浪乐队和拉丁摇摆舞节目，牛仔竞技表演场也正在建设之中。其他商城没有调整外观也感化了客户。英国最早的购物商城之一巴瑞特桥购物中心里，很多店面雇佣第二代或第三代亚裔做职员，把商品销售给新来的东欧移民。

The mall goes downtown
购物中心向市区发展
Yet without white, middle-aged women, few British or American shopping centres could survive. One bold attempt to lure them back can be seen at the corner of Third Street and Fairfax Boulevard in Los Angeles. The Grove shopping centre, which opened in 2002, performs all the functions of a mall without looking at all like one. Like Southdale, it has fountains, flowers, piped music and a good selection of underwear. But the Grove is open to the elements, the plants are real and, rather than vaguely evoking a town centre, it is actually done up to look like one. Or rather (this being Los Angeles) a fantasy amalgam of several town centres.
得不到中年白人妇女的钟爱，英美购物中心就无法生存。为了把她们吸引回来，一些购物商城做了一个大胆的尝试，这在洛杉矶的三丁目和费尔法克斯林荫大道拐角处可见一斑。2002年开业的格罗夫购物中心看起来一点也不像购物商城，却拥有购物商城所有的功能特点。和南谷购物中心一样，内设喷泉、花卉、管乐和内衣裤精选品。但格罗夫购物中心这些元素都是户外的，植被也是真的，朦朦胧胧不亚于一个城镇中心，而它也的确不负盛名。因其坐落于洛杉矶，更恰当一点说，它更像是几个城镇中心的混血儿。

Among the Grove’s 40 or so buildings are a Caribbean house with shutters and a wooden balcony, an Art Deco cinema and a grand Beaux Arts building that houses a branch of the clothes shop Abercrombie & Fitch. Its fountains are choreographed to songs by Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis junior. Every few minutes a tram trundles through the shopping centre. The tram’s driver rings his bell almost constantly, because the other thing that distinguishes the Grove from an old-fashioned mall is that it is nearly always packed.
格罗夫购物中心大约40座建筑中，有一座配备百叶窗和木制楼厅的加勒比式建筑，一座装饰艺术电影院和一座豪华的美术大厦（内设阿伯克比龙与菲奇时装品牌分店）。喷泉随着弗兰克•西纳特拉和小萨米•戴维斯的歌曲起伏舞蹈。每隔几分钟就会有电轨车从购物中心穿过。电轨车司机几乎不间断地鸣钟，因为格罗夫购物中心几乎总是人山人海，车水马龙，这也是格罗夫不同于老式商城的又一元素。

The Grove was built by Rick Caruso (below), a dapper man who owns eight shopping centres in southern California and has three more under way. His next project, a 16-acre development with a large public square, apartments and lots more fountains, will open in 2008 next to the Glendale Galleria. He also plans to build an open-air shopping centre by a race track in the city of Arcadia, where the weary will be transported from shop to shop in a horse-drawn carriage. It is a sign of the popularity of his developments, as well as the bleak future of conventional malls, that the owners of nearby shopping centres are fighting hard to stop him.
格罗夫购物中心的老板叫瑞克•卡鲁索，他外表短小精悍，在南加利福尼亚拥有8座购物商城，还有三座正在建设中。他的下一个工程是一个16英亩的开发区，开发区近邻格伦达风雨商业街廊，内设一个大型的开方式广场，众多公寓住宅和好多喷泉，准备于2008年开业。他还计划在阿凯迪亚市的最著名的赛马场旁边建造一座露天的购物中心，旅途劳累者可以坐在马拉车上在游荡于商店之间。它是瑞克•卡鲁索开发区流行的一个标志，同时也是传统的购物中心凄凉未来的象征，附近其他购物中心的业主为了阻止瑞克•卡鲁索的入侵，正做着垂死挣扎。

Mr Caruso doesn’t think he builds malls. The industry term is “lifestyle centres”; he calls his creations simply “streets”. Nor can he claim to have invented the outdoor shopping centre. Before Gruen’s revolutionary designs, all shopping centres were open to the sky. But Mr Caruso has brought the open-air mall to a pitch of ersatz perfection. It is partly thanks to him, and particularly the Grove, that every new shopping centre built in America next year will be roofless (and several traditional shopping malls will tear off their roofs). Open-air centres will appear not just in temperate places like southern California but also in muggy Houston and frigid Massachusetts.
卡鲁索先生认为他建造的不是商厦。其产业术语应该是“生活方式中心”；他简单地称其杰作为“街道”。他也不主张他发明了户外购物中心。因为在格伦的革命性的设计出现之前，所有的购物中心都是露天的。但卡鲁索已使露天购物商城的功能发挥到了人工的尽善尽美的程度。因卡鲁索，更确切地说是格罗夫购物中心，使得第二年在美国每一个新建造的购物中心都是没有屋顶的（一些传统的购物商厦也想把屋顶掀走）。露天购物中心不但遍布于气候温和的南加利福尼亚，也在闷热的休斯敦和寒冷的马萨诸塞州扎根成长。

The mix-and-match appearance of the “lifestyle centres” is thought to be key to their appeal. Mr Caruso and his designers visit cities as diverse as Savannah and Capri to measure buildings and try to capture their appeal. Architectural styles are jumbled together with the aim of creating a festive, holiday atmosphere which people go to hang out in and end up spending money. “After all,” says Mr Caruso, “you buy things when you’re on holiday that you wouldn’t buy otherwise.” But Mr Caruso also claims, more boldly, that his creations are more “real” and authentic than conventional shopping centres.
“生活方式中心”混搭的外观被认为是吸引人的关键所在。卡鲁索先生和他的设计师游览了很多风格迥异城市采风，诸如南美的萨瓦纳、意大利的卡普里岛。各种建筑风格混搭在一起以求创造一个节日欢庆的氛围，人们身临其中，闲逛，消费，满载而归。“归根结底”，卡鲁索先生说，“人们更愿意在节假日的时候购物，其他时间则没什么购物意愿”。但卡鲁索先生也大胆地声称，他的购物中心比其他传统的购物商城更具真实性！

It is an odd claim for a man whose signature style is a mish-mash of two continents’ and several centuries’ worth of architectural traditions. But, like Gruen half a century ago, Mr Caruso has a bold vision for his developments. Indeed, his vision is rather similar to Gruen’s. Like the Austrian émigré, Mr Caruso believes that people are naturally gregarious, and that America has failed to provide them with places that meet their social needs. Like Gruen, he claims to be trying to create not just profitable shopping places but also more perfect city centres.
如果有人宣称他的建筑独特风格是两大洲和若干世纪建筑传统价值的混搭，这只是一方之谈。但是，如同半个世纪前的格伦，卡鲁索先生对其开发区也有一个大胆的设想。的确，他与格伦的设想如出一辙。如同这位奥地利移民，卡鲁索先生也认为，人们本质上是群居的，喜欢社交的，并认为美国人没有给他们提供场所来满足他们的社交欲望。如同格伦，卡鲁索也声称既要努力创造出盈利的购物场所，同时也是更加完美的城市中心。

There is one crucial difference. Gruen wanted to improve upon the American city centre by modernising and Europeanising it. Mr Caruso, by contrast, looks to the past. He has tried to re-create a kind of prelapsarian downtown where there is no crime or homelessness. His romantic evocations of city centres are possible only because people have forgotten what downtowns used to be like. And they have forgotten, of course, largely because of the suburban shopping malls that Gruen built. It was necessary to kill the American city centre before bringing it back to life.
分歧是存在的。格伦想把美国城市中心现代化和欧洲化使其得以改善。相反，卡鲁索先生放眼过去。他试图重建一种天真无邪的市区，那里没有犯罪、没有无家可归者。在人们已经忘记了过去的市区是如何模样的前提条件下，卡鲁索对城市中心浪漫的召唤是可能实现的。人们早已忘记了过去，当然，这在很大程度上归功于格伦建造的郊区购物商城。只有让美国城市中心毁灭，才能让其获得重生。