''Imagine if you will that something has gone terribly wrong.''
A shopping mall in southwest Florida is using everything, including country music and a dress code, to keep teenagers from hanging out there.
It recently began handing out letters to parents dropping off their kids to the movies:
"Your children meet friends who meet other friends and large groups form," the letter said. "These groups roam the mall usually without a specific purpose and normally well behaved individuals are now in a position to submit to peer pressure and act irresponsibly."
No serious assaults or injuries have been reported, but "their presence affects business."
The code of conduct reads like one students might hear at their own schools. The code bans attire that is offensive or commonly recognized as gang-related and disruptive conduct that may include running and the use of skateboards, rollerblades, bicycles, radios and profanity.
Now, this would be unremarkable except for the fact that this mall was designed from the beginning to be a "magnet mall" to attract development and congregation in a sprawling vacant area of platted residential lots. One of its functions was to stimulate the creation of a world of real people around itself. It took the name "Town Center" and the name was accurate - it sits on prime real estate at the single central intersection of the community's main roads.
As is not uncommon in rapidly developing parts of Florida, there was no ur-downtown. There still is no place for young adults to do anything, other than the "Town Center," with its affordable food court, its air conditioning, its 16-plex cinema.
Build it and they will come. The they, however, is not just the robotic suckers with wallets and golf trousers that mall developers dream of. If you take the center, you are also assuming the position traditionally accorded the public space, the town square, zócalo, piazza, agora.
Go to any real country - one with a culture, a history, an actual sense of the common good - and you will find large public spaces where students hang out, elders argue politics and exercise, lovers wander, musicians and children play, merchants display their wares.
Perhaps it's worth considering what the "Town Center" might do to offer the community some semblance of respect for the public it pretends to serve. The mall has empty commercial spots that could become music rooms, art studios, cafes. The real estate that occupies the center of a real community could develop something other than a merchant's self-centered simulacrum of human communal space.
Yes, you'd have to deal with real people - as cities around the world have been doing for millennia. Commerce and community need each other - they might start by integrating in ways that go beyond the scripted semblance of life marketed to those attempting to make their way through life itself.
Behavioral deviance is the interlinear translation of commercial fascism.
