Worse, few (if any) professional town planners study retailing before formulating plans. For example, although retail planning regulations have been influenced by Central Place Theory, this theoretical framework offers no insight on those private sector businesses that interface with urban planning. This review of policy discusses many of these pressures: many of which fall beyond the urban planning remit. In the post-war period, retail developments have often been discussed in the literature on planning for places – but the wide range of pressures for retail change is rarely brought together. We argue that many malls have effectively become community space, and activism to prevent its loss can be understood as a form of anti-globalization practice, even if it never employs that language.For eighty years, UK government policy related to urban sprawl, town centres and high streets in England and Wales has been dominated by planning/land-use control. Taking the case of the Morningside Mall in an old suburb of Toronto, we investigate the informal claims made on mall space through everyday spatial practice and the explicit claims for community space that arise when that space is threatened. In this article we investigate the revolution in logistics that has provoked the phenomenon of ‘dead malls’ and the creative activism emerging that aims to protect mall space as ‘community space’. This is particularly true in declining inner suburbs, where poor and racialized communities depend more heavily on malls for social reproduction as well as recreation and consumption. Spatial practice often exceeds the conceptions of designers and managers, transforming malls into community space. Much of the disjuncture between popular outcry and academic silence relates to conceptions of ‘public’ space, and specifically the gap between formal ownership and everyday spatial practice. But despite popular concern for the demise of mall space, critical urban scholarship has largely sidelined the phenomenon. ‘Dead malls’ are now a staple of North American (sub)urban landscapes, and have provoked local activism in many places. As retail logistics globalizes and big-box power centres replace enclosed shopping malls from the postwar era, a distinct form of social infrastructure vanishes as well. An entire category of urban space, albeit hardly recognized as such, is disappearing across North America.
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