While the phenomenon of the shopping mall has been declared dead over the past decade or so, its potentially toxic spirit lives on in the increasing commercialisation of privately owned public space.

[...] the ever increasing mallification of our environment threatens to undermine the public common ground on which our societies were founded: public places should address an abstract, inclusive notion of the public, instead of a defined, limited, and exclusive (in the literal sense of the word) audience. Conversely, we should not confuse or conflate trite stores (even if they place trees inside and call themselves town squares) to be an ersatz public domain. 

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