american agora

518 Pages·2015·2.32 MB·English

by  Paul Davies

American Agora:
Pruneyard v. Robins and the Shopping Mall in the United States

by

Paul William Davies

B.A. (Wesleyan University) 1991
M.A. (University of California, Berkeley) 1993
J.D. (Stanford Law School) 2001

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy
in

History

in the

GRADUATE DIVISION

of the

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

Committee in charge:

Professor Richard M. Abrams, Chair
Professor Waldo E. Martin Jr.
Professor John M. Quigley

Fall 2001
American Agora:
Pruneyard v. Robins and the Shopping Mall in the United States

© 2001

by

Paul William Davies
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Abstract

American Agora:
Pruneyard v. Robins and the Shopping Mall in the United States

by

Paul William Davies

Doctor of Philosophy in History

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Richard M. Abrams, Chair

This dissertation tells the story of Pruneyard v. Robins, a 1980 United States
Supreme Court case involving the right to access shopping mall property for free
expression. It is, more broadly, a history of the shopping mall in the United States and of
the changing nature of public space in 20th-century America. It opens by locating the
postwar American shopping mall within the larger context of the history of socio-
commercial space, from the agoras of ancient Greece to the arcades of 19th-century
Europe. It then narrates the history of the shopping center in America, with a particular
focus on the relationship between the new suburban malls and the central business
districts of existing small towns and big cities. It next considers the contribution of a
number of prominent intellectuals to the development of the shopping center and
generally depicts the intellectual climate in which the Pruneyard case appeared. Finally,
it details the Pruneyard litigation itself, from the brief incident that gave rise to the case
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through its ascent to the Supreme Court of the United States. It concludes by analyzing
the legal and intellectual reception of the decision and assesses its impact on public space
in America.
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To mom and dad
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Table of Contents

Preface

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One: Precedent

Chapter Two: The Road To Pruneyard

Chapter Three: The Idea of the Shopping Mall

Chapter Four: The Shopping Mall on Trial

Chapter Five: Aftermath

Conclusion

Bibliography
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Preface

This is a history of the shopping mall in America. It is a history. It is
occasionally the historian’s conceit to think that he or she is crafting the history. I suffer
no such delusion, nor harbor any such ambition. The shopping mall is a sweeping
subject. It invites investigation from architectural historians, social historians, political
historians, and urban historians, to name only a few. It is the concern of anthropology,
sociology, urban geography, and economics. That the shopping mall has been rather
dramatically ignored as a topic of intellectual inquiry makes the need for humility more
intense, not less so. A first cut should not expect to fell a tree. What follows is a first cut
at a broad and synthetic history of the mall. My only expectation is that it should make a
mark.
This expectation was not always so limited. As such, I believe it is worth a
moment of explanation as to how it is that the history I have written here is both more
modest and idiosyncratic than I originally anticipated.
American Agora is told through the lens of a single legal case, Pruneyard v.
Robins. This is, in part, simply a narrative device. But it also represents my own distinct
interest in the shopping mall and its formidable past. I became interested in the mall in
my second year of graduate school, at a time when I fully intended to become a
diplomatic historian. I had the opportunity, in an American history survey seminar, to
read about the case of Pruneyard v. Robins and several other cases in which the United
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States Supreme Court addressed the question of whether there is a right of First
Amendment access to the private property of the shopping mall. I read these cases in the
context of an argument about the continuities and changes in the Supreme Court under
Chief Justices Earl Warren and Warren Burger. But these cases appealed to me
substantively, by which I mean that I was struck at how provocative, and evocative, this
rather slender legal issue about the right to access shopping mall property was. Was the
shopping mall public or private space? How do we understand what these designations
“public” and “private” even mean? Had the shopping mall really replaced the central
business districts of small town, and big city, America?
The “Shopping Mall Cases,” as they have sometimes been called, raised these
questions, among others. The material was more than enough to justify and sustain a
graduate seminar paper. I came to believe, however, that these cases encouraged
something much more substantial: a study of the history of the shopping mall itself. For
what was really at issue in these cases was the transformation of American urban and
suburban space that had taken place over the course of at least the past half-century. The
shopping mall sat squarely in the middle of the transformation, as arguably both cause
and effect. And it did so both literally and figuratively, in that “the mall” had become
both a physical and ideological construction. The question of the right to access had
distilled into legal memoranda and judicial opinions what was actually a much broader
story about the history of the mall in American life. I decided I wanted to tell that story.
I summarily abandoned diplomatic history for the shopping mall--cables and
dispatches and George Kennan for gallerias and food courts and Victor Gruen. I also
somewhat hastily, and no doubt unwisely, abandoned the legal focus that had led me to
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make this change. I set out to write a history of the shopping mall. Or, rather, the history
of the shopping mall: a thorough, and thoroughly sweeping, narrative.
It was not forthcoming. Instead, I found that despite the professed ambition, it
was a fairly discrete set of issues that consistently engaged me. I was, and remain,
curious about nearly everything about the shopping mall, but my true intellectual interest
proved much more focused than my curiosity. Time and again I returned in my research
to several themes in the history of the shopping mall: to architecture and planning, and in
particular the way in which the shopping mall drew off of earlier commercial forms; to
the actual intensity of the competition between downtown and the suburban centers; to
the differences between the shopping mall industry in formation in the 1950s, and in full
throttle success in the 1970s and 1980s; to the relationship between the design and use of
the shopping mall; to the way in which the mall has been debated and discussed in both
the popular and intellectual arenas.
I came to realize that I wanted to write a particular history of the shopping mall,
oriented around these themes. Moreover, I realized that this history that I wished to write
was, in fact, squarely embedded within the legal issue of the right to access, where I had
begun. Early on, I had decided that the history of the shopping mall was a project distinct
from the history of the right to access shopping mall property for First Amendment
expression. For me, this decision was both counter-intuitive and unreasonable. My
history of the shopping mall is ultimately about how we demarcate and contemplate
public and private space. It is nowhere better situated than within the legal drama of
Pruneyard v. Robins.
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The work that follows is, then, a revision of earlier intentions, but more
fundamentally a return to original inspiration. It is a history of the shopping mall in
America, but one that is knowingly, if not too self-consciously, personal. I suspect this is
true, more or less, of most history. There are many histories to be written about the
shopping mall. This is mine.