Dead Malls and Future Campuses — from insidehighered.com by Joshua Kim
Thoughts on Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall.
Excerpt:
Can we learn anything about the future of the university from the history of the shopping mall?
If any lessons connecting malls to colleges are to be found, the starting place is Meet Me by the Fountain. It is hard to imagine a more complete social, architectural, cultural, economic or cross-national comparison of shopping malls than this book provides.
For some, all the detail, theorizing and analysis of the mall’s history, relevancy and meaning might be a bit too much. For those looking for clues about how the university might evolve post-pandemic, the deep dive into malls that Meet Me by the Fountain provides is helpful.