Pdf at http://web.ebscohost.com.ezaccess.libraries.psu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=2&hid=7&sid=64253797-69a3-4dae-9ccc-ad4423d6a6cc%40sessionmgr12

Enunciating Locality in thePostmodern Suburb: FlatIron Crossingand the Colorado LifestyleJessie Stewart & Greg DickinsonThe shopping center is a major part of consumer space built in the U.S., and the shifts inshopping center design are part of the changing landscape of American consumer culture.In this essay we examine FlatIron Crossing, a mall and lifestyle center recently built inColorado, to explore the development of the hybrid space as a response to postmodernsuburbanization. We argue that FlatIron Crossing is a place making technology thatoffers invocations of locality as a response to the abstractions and placelessness of postmodernsuburbanization. Locality, we argue, is different from ‘‘local’’ in that localityoffers images of place rooted in time and geography but drawn from globalized images.Even as recent shopping centers and lifestyle centers offer images of place they do so tocover, without directly addressing, the difficult relation between the global and the local.Keywords: Space; Place; Consumption; Suburbs; Michel de CerteauAs we drive to FlatIron Crossing mall, the snow-capped Rocky Mountains and thesheared rock walls of Boulder County’s FlatIron range serve as the grand backdropto the cities, suburbs, strip malls, and high-tech office parks that fly past our windowsin the foreground. Though we cannot yet see it, we know that to the southeast lie themodernist towers of downtown Denver. These urban, suburban, and natural landscapesvisually and rhetorically frame our journey to the FlatIron Crossing, and beginto condition our understanding of this particular mall, and, as we will argue, malls,Jessie Stewart is a doctoral candidate at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. Greg Dickinson (Ph.D.University of Southern California) is an associate professor of communication studies at Colorado StateUniversity. This essay is taken from Jessie Stewart’s MA thesis ‘‘A Trek Through the Mall: Space, Movement,and the Production of Materiality in FlatIron Crossing’’ directed by Greg Dickinson. A previous version ofthis essay was presented at the National Communication Association Annual Convention, November 2005.Correspondence to: Greg Dickinson, Colorado State University, Department of Speech Communication, 219Eddy Building, Fort Collins, CO 80523-1783, USA. Tel.: 970 431 6893; Fax: 970 491 2160; E-mail: Greg.Dickinson@colostate.eduWestern Journal of CommunicationVol. 72, No. 3, July–September 2008, pp. 280–307ISSN 1057-0314 (print)/ISSN 1745-1027 (online) # 2008 Western States Communication AssociationDOI: 10.1080/10570310802210148consumption, and living in the contemporary world more generally. Within a contextof the suburbanization of U.S. America, archetypal suburban spaces like regionalshopping malls can serve as central sites for investigating the everyday negotiations

necessary to living in the contemporary landscape.If modernity in the West is characterized, at least in part, by the shift from ruralliving to urban living, postmodernity is marked, at least in part, by the shift from citiesto suburbs. Sometime in the late 20th century, suburbs eclipsed cities in totalpopulation and by the 21st century, more people lived in suburbs than in cities orthe hinterlands combined (Hayden, 2003, p. 3). Not only do more people live inthe suburbs than in any other form of contemporary living in the U.S., but suburbsare becoming increasingly important for the diversity of activities embedded in theirboundaries. Today, suburbs are more than simple rows of tract houses; they are thelocations of much of U.S. economic growth. As Dolores Hayden (2003) writes,Describing suburbia as a residential landscape would be wrong . . . because suburbsalso contain millions of square feet of commercial and industrial space, and theireconomic growth outstrips that of older downtowns. Most confusing of all, suburbiais the site of promises, dreams, and fantasies. It is a landscape of the imaginationwhere Americans situate ambitions for upward mobility and economicsecurity, ideals about freedom and private property, and longings for social harmonyand social uplift. (p. 3)Suburbs are the new centers of residential and economic change; they are sites wherethe boundaries—material, aesthetic, economic, and cultural—among city, suburb,and rural are increasingly blurred; and they are the location of many U.S. Americans’social and cultural hopes and fears. It is precisely into this suburban situation thatFlatIron Crossing inserts its voice.FlatIron Crossing inserts this voice through consumption. United States suburbsdepend on, reinforce, and demand private consumption (Hayden, 2003, p. 18).1As Roger Silverstone (1997) argues, ‘‘There is an intimate and indissoluble linkbetween suburbia and buying’’ (p. 8). Suburbs start with the buying of single-familyresidencies. Homeowners then turn to furnishing those homes, clothing themselves,dressing their yards and gardens, and buying the vehicles suburbia demands(Hayden, 2003). In the 1950s commercial developers created some of the first suburbanshopping malls (Cohen, 1996).2 The mall, combined with increased ownershipof vehicles and the development of suburban office parks and other economicgrowth, began to sever the connection between the suburb and the city, as suburbanitescould avoid older cities altogether. Today, the mall serves public functions onceserved by city streetscapes and urban architecture (Buck-Morss, 1995; Cohen, 1996).Mark Clapson (2003) argues that shopping malls, more than just simple structuresthat house stores, are a deeply connected part of ‘‘the American Way of Life’’(p. 31). This deep integration between suburbanization and consumer culture leadsto the centrality of the mall in the everyday lives of many in the U.S.While we can easily establish the general interconnections among suburbia, consumerculture, and malls, less clear are the ways particular malls in particular placesin particular moments might engage audiences. How might a specific mall attractWestern Journal of Communication 281shoppers? In what ways might the materiality and the aesthetics of a particular mallrespond to and order the culturally structured needs of particular people in particularplaces? How might a specific mall negotiate the suburban hopes and desires, ‘‘thepromises, dreams, and fantasies’’ about which Hayden (2003, p. 3) writes? We engagethese questions through a careful investigation of FlatIron Crossing in BroomfieldCounty, Colorado. We argue that FlatIron Crossing is a place making technology thatoffers invocations of locality as a response to the abstractions and placelessness ofpostmodern suburbanization. To make this argument, we will first explore the suburbanizationof the U.S., paying particular attention to the ways suburbia draws on

consumer culture for many of its cultural resources. We will then turn to FlatIronmall to explore the ways the mall negotiates the discontents of suburbia, focusingon both the ways the mall structures users’ experiences as well as the ways in whichthe mall offers possibilities of resistance to those structures. Finally, we will considerwhat our investigation of FlatIron mall offers us in our understanding of materialityof the everyday.Place Making in Postmodern SuburbsScholarship engaging issues of space mark the last 15 years in communicationstudies.3 Increasingly, scholars turn to space and spatial metaphors to help thinkcarefully about subjectivity. Theorizing subjectivity as ‘‘positionality,’’ ‘‘location,’’or ‘‘standpoint’’ clarifies that subjectivity is not inherent in the individual but rathershould be thought of as a node within discursively constructed power relations(Jackson, 1999; Nakayama & Krizek, 1995).4 Lisa Flores (1996) argues that the bordercan be critically engaged through the concept of ‘‘discursive space.’’ For Flores, theborder is not a naturally occurring space, but is constructed within a set of powerrelations that are particularly challenging for Chicana feminists. Living on the‘‘numerous borders the Chicana feminist finds herself mean that she has no discursivespace of her own’’ (p. 144). Using creative works, Chicana feminists begin tocarve for themselves an alternative discursive space not marked by the stereotypesand constraints created by others (Flores, 1996, p. 144).5Scholarship that uses space metaphorically downplays the materiality of space infavor of a discursive understanding of identity and space. And yet, subjectivity isalways embodied and subject positions are taken up in some particular place. As RakaShome (2003) argues, ‘‘Space is not merely a backdrop, though, against which thecommunication of cultural politics occurs’’ (p. 40). Understanding space as morethan ‘‘merely a backdrop’’ demands two interconnected conceptualizations: First,space is itself always socially constructed, never simply natural or empty. Modernityoften figures space as a void filled with actions or productions of humans. Recentscholarship rejects this vision of space and spatiality.6 Henri Lefebvre (1991), providinga starting place for this rejection of modernist understandings of space, arguesthat natural, pure, or original space appears nowhere; space is always only that whichis constructed and constructs the human body and human subjectivity (p. 190).7Space, Lefebvre (1991) asserts, is ‘‘relative’’ to the actions of bodies, for space must282 J. Stewart and G. Dickinsonalways be occupied. Space is organized and created through the (often ritualized)gestures within the space (pp. 170, 216). Gestures, for Lefebvre (1991), are the movementof the body and the spatial relations among people and objects that create thebody and the space in which the body exists. Space, as constituted through socializedand ritualized gestures, is clearly a social production.This discussion of the gestural production of space indicates the second crucialspatial conceptualization: A natural body does not produce a social space. Instead,the body, like space, also produces and is produced within precise spatial coordinates.Space is more than a social construction, it is constructed by and constructive ofbodies (Lefebvre, 1991, p. 170). This spatialized embodiment is nothing more or lessthan the concretization and materialization of subjectivity. Hence, while space canserve as useful metaphor for understanding identity, it is better thought of in waysthat extend beyond metaphor to materiality itself.8 Indeed, the advantage of takingspace seriously is the way it helps reimagine subjectivity (Grossberg, 1996, p. 179).Using only metaphors of space to think about subjectivity can hide theparticularities and materialities of subjectivity. As Raka Shome (2003) argues,Despite this seeming spatial turn in cultural theory, what remains insufficientlyaddressed are the very real and material ways in which space constitutes a site

and a medium for the enactment of cultural power that has important implicationsfor rethinking some key concepts in cultural theory, such as identity andagency. (p. 40)Subjectivity is not enacted in nowhere space but, instead, is enacted ‘‘somewhere’’(Shome, 2003, p. 42).This ‘‘somewhere’’ is indeed crucial to understanding the communicative power ofspace. Within postmodernity, built environments strive to create a sense of ‘‘somewhere.’’Put differently, contemporary spaces (and more particularly, contemporaryspaces of consumption and entertainment) strive to create a ‘‘sense of place’’ (Morris,1998, p. 67). In real ways, place does not exist without the human efforts necessary toturn space into place.9 Place making is a distinctly communicative practice, for it isthrough a series of (often nonverbal) forms and signs that places make a claim to placeness.More than communicative, place making gestures are always rhetorical. Whilethe built environment and its surrounding discourses and embedded practices createthis particular sense of place these objects, discourse, and practices do not make anyother particular sense of place. Thus the landscape nominates a particular sense ofplace as appropriate, affective, and persuasive. Finally, this sense of place is not simplyan ‘‘aesthetic’’ construct (if, indeed aesthetic constructs can be considered simple).Instead, place making strategies always offer very particular frames for seeingand acting in the world. In the strongest Burkian sense, by saying yes to this visionand, by implication, no to all the other possibilities, place making takes on a directlyhortatory consequentiality. At the Henry Parkes Motel, the site of Meaghan Morris’s(1998) reading of place making strategies in the built environment and in culturalstudies, Morris argues forcefully for the importance of the site as a banal momentin the narrative of founding a very particular nation in very particular ways andencoding very specific White colonial values. Place making then is deeply rhetoricalWestern Journal of Communication 283even in—perhaps especially in—the banal spaces of everyday consumption andentertainment. Crucially, of course, place making practices are also and at the sametime identity making practices.Suburbs as Place Making MachinesVirtually from their inception, suburbs have encoded a complex place makingrelation between the city and the country. Beginning in the 1820s as picturesqueenclaves just outside of cities, suburbs consistently drew on images of rural, smalltownlife while maintaining strong connections to city centers (Archer, 2005; Hayden,2003). The suburbs drew on a visual vocabulary of the rural—in particular whatArcher (2005) calls the ‘‘pastoral’’ often figured by the yard, garden, and fence—asan attempt to recover forms lost in the city. The hope placed in these recovered formswas for the renewal of rural and familial values that the city seemed to put understrain (Archer, 2005, pp. 230, 289–293). At the same time, the suburbs looked tothe city for economic, cultural, and consumer resources. Until the 1950s, forexample, a majority of suburban shoppers left the suburbs for the urban shoppingdistricts (Cohen, 1996). From the beginning, then, the suburb was a hybrid space.Neither simply rural nor purely urban, the suburbs proffered and promised the hopesand aspirations of both spaces.It was not, however, until after World War II that suburbs became the centralorganizing mode for residential and consumer spaces. Linked social, cultural, economic,political, and technological shifts fostered this reorganization of space. Stateand federal support of suburbs through tax benefits and road building (in particular,the building of the interstate system), along with the flight of White middle-class residents

from cities as a direct response to the migration of blacks and rural poor to thecities, and the post–World War II economic boom that was felt particularly stronglyin the housing and consumer goods markets, all fuelled suburban growth (Blakelyand Snyder, 1997; Cohen, 1996; Fishman, 1987; Hayden, 2003; Kenyon, 2004; Wiese,1999). Where the typical urban built environment of late nineteenth and earlytwentieth-century depended, in part, on the centrally located, multistory departmentstore (Bowlby, 1985; Marchand, 1985; Porter Benson, 1986), by the late 1950s thesuburb depended on the new shopping mall.It is wrong, however, to simply read the shopping mall as an updated form ofthe department store. While both are spaces of consumption, the mall serves suburbsdifferently than the department stores served the city. The urban department storeprimarily served consumption needs; the new suburban malls were conceived ofand used to meet both consumption and community needs (Cohen, 1996; Farrell,2003). In the postwar malls and shopping centers, Lizabeth Cohen (1996) argues,‘‘was the ‘new city’ of the postwar era, a vision of how community space shouldbe constructed in an economy and society built on mass consumption’’ (pp. 1052–1053). This ‘‘new city’’ reconfigures relations in important ways. Based, as it is, onmass consumption, this new civic space relies on market segmentation to imaginecommunal relations. As the mall asserted its position as a communal space, it284 J. Stewart and G. Dickinsonprivatized this space and privileged private property owners’ voices over those ofpublic citizens. Finally, the mall created a suburban space that enhanced women’sclaims on suburbia and yet empowered them ‘‘more as consumers than producers’’(Cohen, 1996, pp. 1053–1055). What we see, then, with the postwar mall specificallyand with suburban space more broadly is the diminution of traditional civic interactionas a mode of creating communal public space and the rise of consumer activitiesand consumer spaces as new modes of city making.10However, as much as mall designers desired shopping malls to become part ofcommunity, the designs themselves as well as the globalization of consumer cultureundermined the possibilities of the mall connecting with particular communities.The mall was, nearly from the beginning, an inadequate substitute for the seemingloss of community characteristic of postwar suburbs (Buck-Morss, 1995, p. 25). Thisincreasing placelessness, however, was part of larger challenges fostered by modernityand postmodernity, which made locating oneself and one’s identity in a meaningfultime and place increasingly difficult. As Marshal Berman (1982) asserts about modernity,‘‘All that is solid melts into air’’ (p. 15). Whereas the modern city began to tearthe bonds of time and place in the post-WWII suburbs, with their cookie-cutterhomes, instant landscaping, and a-historical public spaces like the mall only increasedthis sense of placeless and spaceless existence. And so, the suburb became both thesite of U.S. American’s hopes for a new and better community (one that, as criticafter critic reminds us, seems founded on exclusion as much as inclusion) but it alsobecame the site of the anomie and fragmentation characteristic of postmodernity.This hope for the suburb as place making community center is a direct response tothe place destroying logic of postmodern globalization. Characteristic of emergentpostmodern spaces is a deep conflict between, on the one hand, abstraction, decentralization,and fragmentation and, on the other, the attempt to create localized, concrete,and centered spaces (Dear, 1995, p. 72). The abstractions, decentralizations,and fragmentations are driven, in part, by postmodern cultural shifts and postfordisteconomic changes. High-speed communication technologies that link the world culturally

and economically serve to undermine the power of local spaces to shape identitiesand politics (Collins, 1995; Harvey, 1989; Sorkin, 1992; Vidler, 1992). These arethe very shifts that lead to the newest forms of suburbanization, namely the creationof what Joel Garreau (1991) calls ‘‘edge cities’’ (p. 3). These edge cities are suburbanin that they offer large-scale residential development at some distance from more traditionalurban sites. Unlike traditional suburbs, however, edge cities provide morethan residential development or even residential and retail space. Instead they are alsosites of strong job growth and in particular job growth within the information ageeconomic sectors that include computer technology, commercial and financial services,and the like (Fishman, 1987; Garreau, 1991; Hayden, 2003). Growing rapidlyand depending on global economic relations, edge cities are increasingly independentfrom the older cities they surround.The rapid growth of these edge cities, combined with the spatial, cultural, and socialseparation from traditional centers of power and identity, raises important issues ofdaily life. For even as these new suburbs offer large houses, fine shops, and job growth,Western Journal of Communication 285they seem to many residents to be abstract and placeless. The geographic and culturaldistinctions that marked older cities all but disappear in the new edge cities. Since eachnew suburb consists of the same types of instant architecture and cultural resources(chain restaurants and coffee shops, for example), the loss of vernacular spaces canbecome deeply felt (Buck-Morss, 1995; Burgin, 1996; Dear, 1995; Dickinson, 2002;Ellin, 1997; Giddens, 1991). As Victor Burgin (1996) argues, the growth of postmodernspaces created along the axes of postmodern globalized and mediated forces, underminesolder modes of object=subject differentiation. These new spaces make it difficultto recognize where one is, and even more troubling, who one is in the first instance.Within the postmodern moment it is easy to, as Burgin (1996) suggests:‘‘Lose our place in time.’’ The fabric of self-identity—individual, ethnic, ornational—is woven in time and space, history and geography, memory and place.In mediatic space-time, however, neither monument nor moment survives beyondthe immediate, and there are no permanently stable points of orientation. (pp.190–191)Thus, the consequences of postmodern culture as encoded into the built environmentcan be and often are deeply disturbing, as the self and community no longer seemtethered to the concreteness of time and space.Spatial rhetoric within this postmodern placelessness addresses the need and desireto create a heightened sense of place. Consumer and entertainment spaces (the differencesbetween which are collapsing), in particular, seem driven to create place. Awide variety of visual and material artifacts along with discourses and practices canoffer the possibility of place. For example some places work hard to appear ‘‘authentic’’while others offer visitors an engaging experience of inauthenticity (Wood,2005). In FlatIron Crossing we will argue that the designers gesture toward authenticityand locality which, together, strive to suture visitors into comforting traditionsand the solidity of the Rocky Mountains.By thinking of malls and lifestyle centers as a place making technologies, we canproductively imagine the everyday spaces of postmodernity as material grammarsor structures of resources out of which users, through tropes and turns, can constructand enact meaningful identities within a complex and disorienting world. Much likeLefebvre’s (1991) notion of gestures that form and define the body’s relationship withspace, de Certeau (1984) constructs parallels between speech acts and spatial performances

to analyze the language of movement in everyday spaces, such as the city. ‘‘Theact of walking is to the urban system what the speech act is to language’’ (p. 97).De Certeau expands the idea of enunciation from the traditional framing of speechacts to describe the ‘‘procedures’’ of ‘‘the network of social practices’’ (p. 19), one ofthem being walking, creating a grammar of movement. It is through an ‘‘enunciation,’’as de Certeau (1984) names it, that mall visitors can make the place into theirown. As an analytical tool, enunciation allows de Certeau to posit a strong relationshipbetween the users and their spaces. In this regard, the spaces become a language structureor a grammar and the use of the space becomes an enunciation—a ‘‘saying’’—ofthe space (de Certeau, 1984, pp. 33, 97–98). This enunciation performs and utilizes theresources, structures, or grammars of the space.286 J. Stewart and G. DickinsonPerforming identity within FlatIron Crossing takes up the symbolic and materialresources the built environment and surroundings offer the visitor and yet FlatIronCrossing does not determine the user’s identity. What is more, enunciation, even as itis a performance using the spatial resources, is a ‘‘performance on’’ the space (deCerteau, 1984, p. 33). As the users walk through the space, performing their identity,they are remaking the space itself in their own image even as the space invites someidentities (consumer, for example) over others. This performance on space may haveno lasting or mappable effects—indeed to the extent that this performance is ‘‘tactical’’it will be precisely a performance that shapes time (the present) while leaving thespace unchanged (de Certeau, 1984, p. xix). Finally, space as a meaningful systemabsolutely depends on the enunciative performance of the users, just as language(langue) depends on the speech act (parole) for its appearance.What makes FlatIron’s enabling and constraining of identity even more powerfullycomplex is that it is a site that at once offers both the (im)possibilities of suburbanperformativity as well as the material and cultural goods users=consumers take withthem as the necessary ‘‘props’’ of their suburban life. As Carole Spitzack (1993)argues, postmodern identity is a performance enacted in part through consumergoods and reliant on cultural and social structures. As FlatIron Crossing enunciatesa particular rhetoric of postmodernity, it offers to its users a grammar for their performanceof identity in the presence of the mall, and it offers—in its stores and itsassertions about ‘‘the proper’’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. xix)—material and symbolicgoods visitors can take with them to their homes, work, school, and play (de Certeau,1984, p. 100).We can investigate FlatIron Crossing as enunciation in two ways. First, it plays agrammatical or structural role in the enunciative possibilities of its users. It offers toits visitors a set of resources out of which users can, through the tropes and turns of a‘‘rhetoric of walking,’’ make their own suburban identities. FlatIron Crossingbecomes not just a stage on which individuals perform their identities, but it is alsothe material structure that enables and constrains the performance of very particularidentities. Second, it is itself an enunciation—a saying—in the larger cultural discoursesof postmodern place making. It takes up, utilizes, and remakes the visual,material, and symbolic possibilities within postmodern consumer architecture. It isin this enunciative sense that the mall is a hybrid; it brings together otherwise disparatevisual vocabularies. FlatIron Crossing is at once a response to and a constitutivepart of the postmodern suburb. It provides structures to make sense of and livewithin the difficulties of suburbia, while at the same time, in very particular ways,it enunciates this postmodernity.Locating FlatIron Crossing

Because of this double enunciation, it should not surprise us that the mall islocated in Broomfield, Colorado; for Broomfield is a nearly perfect example of apostmodern, edge city. Located northwest of Denver, Broomfield is but the latestinstantiation of the spread of edge cities along Colorado’s Front Range. GrowingWestern Journal of Communication 287from just over 20,000 in 1980 to nearly 50,000 in 2005 (Broomfield PopulationGrowth, n.d., 2005), and incorporated as both a town and a county in 2001,Broomfield is, in many ways, a brand new city (Broomfield Community Profile,n.d., 2005). With a population that is Whiter, wealthier, better educated, and morelikely to be ‘‘professional’’ than its region’s towns or the state as a whole, Broomfieldis a ‘‘successful’’ edge city (Broomfield Community Profile).11 The city is composedof large, planned residential developments, a group of high-tech companieslike Storage Tek, large name-brand convention style hotels and, of course, FlatIronCrossing.12 In short, Broomfield enters into a social, cultural, and material conditiontypical of postmodern suburban space. In some ways, the city is anotherhybrid, expanding to reach between Denver and Boulder’s city limits.As such, Broomfield is caught in the interstices of the struggle in postmodern placemaking. Devoted to the economic and cultural possibilities of globalization and builtin the near present, Broomfield is a nearly ideal space in which to investigate the(im)possibilities of place making. More specifically, FlatIron Crossing serves as apowerful site in negotiating the tensions between the placelessness of globalized consumerculture and deep desires for locally rooted spaces. Indeed, its response to thediscontents of postmodern place making relies precisely on images of local rootednesscreated through references to the natural.FlatIron Crossing, Hybridity, and a Rhetoric of LocalityLike the suburb of which it is a part, FlatIron Crossing is a hybrid, impure space.Where the suburb is between the city and the country, between urbanism and ruralliving, FlatIron Crossing is a hybrid between the traditional indoor mall and contemporary,outdoor ‘‘lifestyle’’ shopping centers. The name ‘‘FlatIron Crossing’’ gives usthe first clue to this impurity—a cross between a mall and a lifestyle center and aspace of crossing between and through the indoor and the outdoor, the culturaland the natural. The hybrid label is used as an architectural term to define the blendingof indoor and outdoor areas (Jencks, 1987) and FlatIron was only the secondshopping center in the country to use this style.13 Since its opening, FlatIron’s hybriddesign has been reproduced around the country, (Berta, 2000; Pate, 2004) and ‘‘maybe the trend of the future’’ (Medina, 2004). The indoor, two-story shopping mall isthe larger area of the shopping center. Four department stores, Dillard’s, Macy’s,Dick’s Sporting Goods, and Nordstrom anchor half of the mall’s circumference.The large food court area takes up the southwest side of the mall that leads to theoutdoor section, titled The Village at FlatIron Crossing. Extending from the mall,The Village is the equivalent of two city blocks (Pate, 2000b) lined with shops, restaurants,and anchored by the AMC 14-plex Theater. For designers, it is this combinationof a more traditional indoor mall, with an outdoor lifestyle center thatmakes FlatIron Crossing a hybrid space.FlatIron Crossing was designed to be more than just a mall, transcending theboundaries of what a consumer space can be. When building FlatIron, Westcor,288 J. Stewart and G. Dickinsonthe mall’s first development group, expressed that combination of aesthetics such asnatural light, stone and wood products would ‘‘expel any notion that FlatIron

Crossing is, in fact, a mall’’ (Pate, 2000b, p. J1). One major theme found in thediscussions and descriptions of FlatIron Crossing was its comparison to being natural.On a small billboard inside the Zip Shopping Shuttle Bus is the statement:‘‘FlatIron Crossing. The natural place to shop.’’ The lifestyle center, on the mostliteral level, is a hybrid of shopping performances within FlatIron, where ‘life’becomes a personal journey blending locality and ‘style,’ and is, in part, a fashionedexpression of identity enabled and limited by the mall. The transformations of theconsumer space as an articulation of a postmodern hybrid include blurring conceptsof in and out, merging the mountains and the mall, and connecting Coloradoactivity and the natural with consumerism.14 In its attempt to sell itself as ‘‘thenatural place to shop,’’ it commodifies the land. FlatIron Crossing too is a commodityitself, sold as part of a community, and shopping there ties one’s identityto that community.The rooting of the FlatIron Crossing into its surrounding landscape is central tothe way Macerich—the shopping center’s current owner and developer—imaginesthe space. ‘‘FlatIron Crossing,’’ writes the shopping centers’ marketers on the FlatIronCrossing web page,is a setting for shopping, dining, and entertainment that fits with the lifestylesof our guests. It’s an innovative architectural expression of the Flatirons, themountain canyons, high country trails, and prairies not too far away. We area shopping destination that expands traditional notions of what such a placecan be—opening our doors to the outdoors just as Coloradans do their ownlives.FlatIron Crossing was once just a vision that sprang from the dreams of the Cityof Broomfield and the developer Westcor Partners. It is now reality—a dreamcome true—and FlatIron Crossing has become the premier shopping and retailcommunity located between Denver and Boulder in the rolling high plains ofColorado, just at the door to the Rocky Mountains. Set against the backdropof the Flatirons and Boulder Valley, FlatIron Crossing reflects the beauty of thenatural area surrounding it and has become Colorado’s new shopping destinationthat expresses the setting and sensibilities of the landscape where it takes root(FlatIron Crossing).‘‘Rooting’’ the shopping center into the natural landscape serves to localize theFlatIron Crossing while also localizing the center into the ‘‘lifestyle’’ of ‘‘Coloradoans.’’15 The Colorado lifestyle begins with open doors. These open doors lead mostprominently to the Rocky Mountains. The awesome distinction between insideand outside, beauty of the Rocky Mountains and the FlatIron range is crucial to thisdiscourse, but so to are the activities associated with the great outdoors including skiing,snowboarding, hiking, and climbing. The ‘‘open doors’’ of the Colorado lifestyleprovides the key to understanding FlatIron’s rhetorical claims. As we will arguebelow, one of the crucial rhetorical moves of the shopping center is to blur the distinctionbetween inside and outside.Western Journal of Communication 289Blurring Inside and OutsideAlthough the lifestyle center is two separate sections with separate names, the designallows for a fluid conversation between the two, blurring distinct boundaries of whatis typically considered in or out. Dick’s Sporting Goods is an example of this blending.The store’s fac¸ade is a distinguishing focal point of the mall; the massive twostoryeast wall is made almost entirely of windows that meet a peaked roof, lettingin natural light and a view of the currently undeveloped open space beyond the mall.Driving west towards FlatIron, one can see that the large wall of windows and the

rooftop designs are evocative of the mountain peaks west of the mall. Inside, the verticalclimbing wall is centered. This Colorado recreational staple is made manageableand safe within the mall as one tries out the products to be used on the actual cliffsjust miles away. That glass is the only element separating the customers from Colorado’sofferings of outdoor adventures, fresh air, and sunshine, and that Colorado’soutdoor adventures can be explored with the help of the products found insidethe store, deemphasizes the indoor and outdoor separation.The intermingling of indoor and outdoor space with the use of glass continues onthe other side of the mall in the transition space between the indoor mall—FlatIronCrossing—and the outdoor lifestyle center—The Village. The food court is the largestopen space indoors and is brighter than the rest of the mall. The walls and doors leadingto the Village are made almost entirely of plate glass windows, again letting innatural light and views of the rock pools and large sandbox outside (Figure 1). Stringsof small, clear, outdoor bulbs are crisscrossed above the seating area. Along the wallabove the vendors, opposite the wall of glass, is a painted scene of a sunset. Purple,orange, and yellow clouds blend together in the light, bringing the beauty of theFigure 1 Food Court with Painted and Real Sunlight (Photograph by the authors).290 J. Stewart and G. Dickinsonsunset permanently inside to enjoy. Farrell (2003) discusses how malls use the naturalto construct themselves as natural. The blurring and blending of the painted sunscapeswith the natural light and the rock pools along the paved walkways withthe FlatIron Mountain Range in the distance pronounce the mall space as complimentto and a part of the natural place of Colorado. At the same time, these imagesof nature strive to ‘‘naturalize the commercial environment’’ (Farell 2003, p. 51).FlatIron Crossing forms a relationship between indoors and out by extending itsborders to include the outdoor landscape of the mountains as part of its scenery. Partof the lifestyle center and the creation of new designs is the capitalization of surroundingland, often selling the scenery as part of the shopping package. The RockyMountains are an international landmark. This striking piece of Colorado bringstourists from all over the world to participate in outdoor adventures. The ruggedbeauty of the FlatIron Range connects with FlatIron Crossing, as the mall takes itsname from the range. Its position below the mountains blends the two materialspaces of the built mall and the natural mountain formations.Already we can see the material mall structure attempting to blur the boundariesof the built space and the surrounding natural area. From the store selling recreationalequipment while providing a view of the great outdoors, to the food courtas an indoor picnic area open to multiple representations of a sunset, to naming themall after the mountains, the hybridity extends traditional built borders of the mall tocultural cues and landscapes.Nature From the Outside InWhile FlatIron’s design blurs outside and inside, visitors must, nonetheless, traversethis difference. De Certeau (1984) argues that people participate within spatial structuresin much of the same ways we engage in language. Where engagement withlanguage depends on the spoken or written word, enunciation of spatial structuresdepends on pedestrain movement. This enunciative movement involves performingone’s own space within particular places, maneuvering and recreating space withintopographical systems, and negotiating relationships with one’s positions throughmovement of speech or strides (pp. 97–98). The mall’s design takes advantage of thismovement to suture the built environment into the natural landscape. The mall’s

design attempts to promote consumer practices and connections to the surroundingland to establish its place in the community as natural and authentic components ofpostmodern suburban life. The participation of the patrons and their potential‘‘appropriation of the topographical system’’ (de Certeau, 1984, p. 97) must confrontthe stone and landscaping used as major components in FlatIron’s aesthetic.As they drive to the mall, visitors can see the FlatIron range in the background.One of the most apparent ways that the mall roots itself in the Colorado landscapeis through the use of stone in both the indoor and outdoor areas of the mall. Much ofthe stone comes from quarries located in Colorado, promoting local ties and keepingthe mall ‘‘grounded’’ as part of the land. This use of stone and other natural elementsWestern Journal of Communication 291is introduced to visitors as they drive into the mall’s parking lot. Far more dramaticthan its mall precursors, FlatIron’s exterior directly connects the mall to its largerlandscape. The stone used in the exterior is roughly hewn and cut into large slabsto create a natural look that organizes the landscaping. Over 2,000 tons of sandstonewas used ‘‘to create this natural setting’’ and ‘‘evoke a natural environment that isinherent to the region’’ (Adams, 2001, {1). Indeed, the FlatIrons to which the mallname refers is a dramatic—even sublime—series of cliffs that frame the landscape tothe west of the mall. The striking stone elements in the mall’s exterior repeat—enunciate—in both form and color the cliffs visitors’ may have seen as they drove into themall’s parking lot.This invocation of the Rockies is most obvious at the north entrance of mall, nearDick’s Sporting Goods, where there is a steep staircase next to an impressive, twostorytall rock-filled waterfall. The waterfall is a contrast to the water featured inolder, traditional malls. First, the waterfall is outside rather than inside the mall(See Farrell, 2003). Unlike many other malls that use water in indoor fountains, FlatIronCrossing does not incorporate water inside the mall.16 Second, rather thanbeing a water fountain that is obviously human designed and refers more to art(or artifice) than nature, this is a rugged recreation of a mountain stream or of awhite-water run on the nearby Poudre, Big Thompson, or Boulder rivers. As shoppersdescend the staircase, the parking lot is no longer visible and the rushing waterfall,the rock pool, and the picnic tables make the space seem more like a pristine restarea on a hiking trail than a mall entrance. The waterfall appears as though a bit ofthe mountains have been transplanted here at the entrance of the mall. This combinationof natural stone and flowing water is repeated in The Village where local stonewas cut to make a small waterfall and surround two large water pools, one of which ison the side of the sandbox area (Figures 2 and 3). The creation of fresh water poolsand rushing waterfalls outside blends the mall with an image of Colorado as a crisp,clean, refreshing, invigorating, and calming natural state. The stone, as a simple,natural material, provides the image of rugged beauty. Designing rock waterfallsrealized in local stone connects FlatIron Crossing to the state’s natural scenery.Throughout their stay, visitors are asked to parley with the space as a shopping center,leisure retreat, and part of the landscape that are all to be markedly part of aparticular form of life in Colorado as well.The plantings in the mall’s surrounding landscaping further emphasize local naturalscenery. The prairie grasses, shrubs, and Aspens that form the backbone of thelandscaping are—or appear to be—indigenous. These plants are arranged notaccording to the more formal rules of many gardens but are planted in a way thatdraws on the organization of plants found in the prairies and mountains nearby.Plantings that could appear in the region naturally make the landscape around the

mall blend with the larger landscape and therefore it continues as an unquestionednatural part of environment.But this suturing of the shopping center into its environment does not end at thedoorways. Instead, the stone, rushing water, and native plantings serve as ‘‘rules forreading’’ the interior of the building (Blair and Michael, 1999, p. 59). As we argued292 J. Stewart and G. Dickinsonabove, descending the stairs by Dick’s Sporting Goods, beside the rushing waterfalland into a replication of a forest scene, transitions visitors from the parking lot tothe shopping center. More importantly, this transition moves the visitor from thethoroughly artificial outside of the parking lot, through a ‘‘naturalized’’ outdoors ofthe rushing waterfall. This movement urges viewers to see the inside of the mall as alsonatural—or at least more natural than the acres of macadam that surround the mall. Itis very precisely through walking in the space that visitors are conditioned, then, to seethe inside of the mall and the trails of Village as part of the natural landscape. Thematerial space of the mall and the design of natural elements surrounding it uttersa particular order for patrons to follow. Although de Certeau (1984) asserts that we‘‘transform each spatial signifier into something else,’’ he acknowledges that mostof our daily activities, including our participation in shaping consumer space, are‘‘tactical in character’’ (p. 98, xix).The rugged naturalness of the exterior becomes a more refined naturalness inside.The predominant use of stone is the most obvious way the mall ties together the outsideand the inside of the mall. Inside, stone is cut in a multitude of different sizedsquares that cover the corridors and hallways. In the flooring of the mall’s commonareas, the stone has very perceptible texture; it is just slightly rough and ridged. Thistexture distinguishes FlatIron’s floors from the more finished (and urbane) lookof marble, and it is far more ‘‘natural’’ looking than the tile more typical of mallwalkways. Just as importantly the stone feels different than that of other materials.As visitors walk along the shopping center’s paths, they can materially experiencethe hard roughness of these surfaces. They can almost imagine that they are hikingFigure 2 Waterfall at Northeast Entrance to FlatIron Crossing (Photograph by the authors).Western Journal of Communication 293along a well cared for forest trail. ‘‘The walking on this ‘‘trail’’ is quite literally a‘‘walking rhetoric.’’ Unlike de Certeau’s (1984) hopeful vision of walking rhetoricin which the user transforms place into space through tropes and turns, this trailcolonizes walking rhetoric, structuring what might otherwise be a resistive meaningfor the path. In a sense, these walkways are like building sidewalks through lawnswhere walkers might otherwise disobey the ‘‘stay off the grass’’ signs.17The natural light that floods the mall emphasizes the rich, earthiness of this palateand further blurs inside and outside. One of FlatIron’s particular charms is theextensive use of natural sunlight. ‘‘The natural lighting is three times what other mallshave’’ (Pate, 2000b, p. C1) and FlatIron won awards for creative design choices withlighting (‘‘Outstanding,’’ 2001). Sunlight is positioned as having a unique connectionwith Colorado, and FlatIron the key to displaying it properly. FlatIron Crossingliterature boasts that Colorado clocks ‘‘more annual hours of sun than San Diegoor Miami Beach’’ (2005 Shopping and Dining Incentives, 2005), and the mall takesadvantage of Colorado’s 300 days of sunshine a year (‘‘Outstanding’’ 2001). Both thenorth entrance and the food court area discussed earlier have oversized glass garageFigure 3 Pool and Children’s Sandbox in FlatIron Village (Photograph by the authors).294 J. Stewart and G. Dickinsondoors that can be raised when weather permits. Industrial steel beams are usedthroughout the mall to hold up high ceilings and frame large windows. The strengthof the beams contrast and compliment the airy openness they help create with

vaulted ceilings and glass panes that let natural light in (Figure 4). ‘‘The high ceilingsand huge windows ease shopping stress,’’ (Pate, 2000a, p. J1) creating a soothing, spacious,comfortable atmosphere.The use of locally sourced stone, the rushing waterfalls, and natural-looking pools,the landscape filled with indigenous plantings, the sunlight flooding of the interior allconnect FlatIron Crossing to the larger landscape. Individually, each element speaksof the natural. Taken together, they create a powerful visual and material recollectionof one of the most significant and defining features of Colorado’s image—the sublimeRocky Mountains. Nathan Stormer (2004) argues that the 20th century ismarked, in part, by the ‘‘commercialization of the sublime aesthetics’’ (p. 220). AnselAdams’s nature photographs, Stormer argues ‘‘attempted to coax the public into arejuvenating, hygienic (or purifying) relationship with nature’’ (p. 223). In a similarway, the life, energy, and beauty of the mountains are tamed in the mall, packaged asa commodity, and contained in stores like Borders Books and restaurants like TheTavern. By taking the name of the range, utilizing the materials of the mountains,drawing on the rugged waterfalls and trails of the landscapes, FlatIron Crossing itselfbecomes part of the outdoor landscape as it is situated within Colorado lifestyles ofmountain exploration and outdoor appreciation. By using the mountains as a sellingpoint and a part of the mall, FlatIron Crossing offers visitors a connection to themountains that can rejuvenate them, a voyeuristic travel experience while remainingin the mall.Figure 4 Vaulted Ceilings in FlatIron Crossing (Photograph by the authors).Western Journal of Communication 295With its association to the mountains, FlatIron Crossing challenges the boundariesthat are considered natural. Natural markers such as rivers and mountains are used asboundary lines and typically the mountains would be considered separate from thematerial construction of the mall. FlatIron Crossing’s place in the natural alters thatperception. FlatIron Crossing’s use of natural materials to build the mall, use of naturalcolors for design, its use of natural light and water, and its connections with themountains provide continuity and contentment for shoppers, as if their belonging inthe space, just as the space itself, is natural. These representations within the mall helpreinforce both a Colorado identity and an appreciation of the scenery and therefore, awillingness to stay in the mall, making it the latest natural Colorado activity. Theinterpenetration of the natural and the cultural, the outside and the inside, containsanother clue to understanding FlatIron, for FlatIron is a hybrid space that, like thesuburb of which it is a part partakes of and enunciates a number of intersecting evencontradictory forces.FlatIron Crossing as Natural Colorado ActivityThe weaving of mall and mountains is not simply about a natural vision but anaturalizing vision of the Colorado lifestyles (Barthes 1972, p. 129). For all of theshopping center’s claims to offer and represent a universalizing Cororado identity,the lifestyle it offers is a far more particular vision. In drawing on the visual vocabularyof the mountains—rushing waterfalls, calm pools, rugged paths hewn fromstone, abundant sunlight—the mall provides an opportunity to hike and play inthe great Rocky Mountains while buying furniture at Crate and Barrel, clothes atColdwater Creek, or shoes at Birkenstock. This connection to outdoor recreationis crucial to the interior decoration of the mall. The furniture, rugs, rugged openbeams, giant fireplace all repeat the design vocabulary of the ski resort.Even as the indoor mall recreates an upscale ski resort lodge (and, we suspect,the upscale ski resort lodge recreates a suburban mall) the outdoor lifestyle centerrecreates the ski villages of Breckenridge, Vail, or Aspen. The outdoor center reinforcesColoradoans’ ‘‘natural’’ love for the outdoors. Critics praised FlatIron for its

‘‘original’’ idea of local connection. ‘‘FlatIron Crossing, one of the first superregionalsto add a lifestyle component, engages the locals’ love of the outdoors’’(Sokol, 2002, p. 10). FlatIron Village is designed to recreate the quaint ski townand capitalize on Colorado’s outdoor recreational image and collective, nostalgicmemories of drives to the mountains, weekend ski trips, and faintly rememberedreferences to small town community.The use of the word ‘‘village’’ for FlatIron’s outdoor promenade connotes a small,close-knit community. The Village is home to smaller boutiques, office spaces, andlarge eateries. This generalized small town nostalgia is inflected in FlatIron Villagewith images of Rocky Mountain hikes and ski towns. The nature trail that is TheVillage walkway delivers a natural atmosphere through the use of stone, plants,and water throughout. The meandering pedestrian trail that ends with a small296 J. Stewart and G. Dickinsonamphitheater designed for live music very precisely recalls the village designs of theski towns up the mountain.Crucial here is the interpenetration not only of visual vocabularies as the mall drawson images of ski towns and lodges, but the interpenetration of activities. The Villagecreates a ski town inflected Main Street, offering a complex nostalgia for home andfor the leisure of vacation and tourism (Morris, 1998). However, more than simplyoffering a vision of leisure, of vacation, and of home, FlatIron Crossing and the Villageoffer the entertaining activities of leisure, vacation, and the home. Home goods are forsale in Pottery Barn and Restoration Hardware, leisurely eating on a heat-lampwarmed deck is available at Gorden Biersch brewpub, and equipment for skiing,hiking, and climbing are for sale at Helly Hansen and Dick’s Sporting Goods.Building on these tropes of Colorado lifestyles and activities—skiing is the mostobvious but also climbing, hiking, and camping—FlatIron Crossing specifies the lifestyleit offers its customers. These leisure activities specify the shopping centers classand ethnic affiliations for these activities are overwhelmingly white and wealthy. Skiing,for example, is considered a ‘‘resort sport’’ (Brady) that is ‘‘deemed whiter thanthe snow’’ (Jordan). Exploring the specifics of the demographics of skiing can beginto specify the Colorado lifestyle offered in the shopping center. Demographicresearch about skiing reveals that skiers are well educated with 66% of skiers havingobtained a college degree and nearly 30% have done post-graduate work (Ski Demographics,2006). They are also relatively wealthy with an average income of over$85,000 per year—this wealth may be even more prevalent at the elite Coloradoski area lift tickets well over $70.00 per day for the 2007-2008 ski season.18 Familieswith children under the age of 17 and singles aged 18–34 make up a vast majority ofskiers. Demographics for climbing, mountain biking, backpacking, hiking and otheroutdoor adventure activities are more difficult obtain. The media kits for the magazinesthat support these activities indicate that the income and education characteristicsof the people that read these magazines mirror those of skiers (Climbing, 2006;ALC Data, 2007; National Geographic Adventure 2007). What is more, it appears thatenthusiasts of one of these sports are likely also to engage in many of the others,creating a constellation or cluster of people, activities, and implied values (Climbing,2006). Defining the Colorado lifestyle as one that opens doors to the mountains andrelies on images of ski lodges and mountain hikes produces a very particular kind ofColoradoan. Crucially the demographics of this kind of Coloradoan—upper-middleclass and wealthy families and 18–34 year-old adults—delineates the ideal shoppers inFlatIron crossing.When the demographics of these activities are combined with the demographics ofBroomfield outlined above—a county and a city that is Whiter, wealthier, and better

educated than the state as a whole—we can be begin to see that FlatIron Crossingdoes not simply represent back to Coloradoans and identity that already exists, butrather is a technology striving to produce a very specific identity that is bound byethnicity and class. As such, FlatIron expresses and produces what Pierre Bourideucalls habitus. For Bourdieu (1977), habitus ‘‘produces’’ practices that allows ‘‘agentsto cope with unforeseen and ever-changing situations’’ (p. 72). Habitus produces aWestern Journal of Communication 297‘‘commonsense’’ world, endowing actions within the world meaning and sense(Bourdieu, 1977, p. 82). The structures of habitus are ‘‘the product of history,’’and ‘‘[produce] individual and collective practices, and hence history, in accordancewith the schemes engendered by history’’ (Bourdieu, 1977, p. 82). Crucially, however,these historically produced and action producing structures are not necessarilyunderstood by actors as historically contingent or particular. Indeed, like RolandBarthes’s myth, these historically produced structures come to be seen as naturaland universal—in short, commonsense.FlatIron Crossing, drawing on a range of preexisting visual and material possibilitiesis a technology for producing a habitus we may call the Colorado lifestyle. Theshopping center strives to naturalize this identity through its appeals to nature andgeography. It ‘‘roots’’ this identity—this habitus—in the land, finding a concretefoundation in the rocks and soil of the Rocky Mountain Front range. This rootingis, in a broader sense, a rhetoric of locality in which the shopping center is a technologynot only for producing a particular identity but also for drilling this identitydown into the bedrock of a very particular place. Oddly, this move to a particularityis also and at the same time a move of generalization. Even as the shopping centeroffers a rhetoric of locality, this rhetoric covers over the historical specificity ofthe identities offered. Rooted in the Colorado landscape, the Colorado lifestyle offersvery particular images for very particular people as a universal and universalizingprinciple. It is in the driving to, walking through, and shopping in this space thatvisitors can enunciate, enact, and perform the identity proffered. The enunciation,enactment, and performance of the identity is what makes the spatial rhetoric ofthe FlatIron Crossing and other identity and place making machines so powerful.The space does not simply engage the mind or the psyche of the visitor—it engagesthe whole person. The identity offered is not only an identity to be enacted elsewhere,but is enacted in the space in which the identity is offered.Both FlatIron and Colorado’s ski towns offer recreation. In these contexts, recreationtakes on the valence of a time outside of the banalities and stresses of everydaywork and family life (Morris, 1998). The mall, like the resort town, becomes a touristsite, a place for vacations, a theme-parked experience of the Rockies. But it also offers amore literal re-creation, a s(t)imulation of rootedness, and a rhetoric of locality (Dickinson& Maugh, 2004). Built of whole cloth, Broomfield, FlatIron Crossing, and FlatIronVillage become sewn into the fabric of the landscape and of the culture of theRockies. It is a (no) place that asserts deep connections to place. FlatIron is a nodein the intersecting networks of globalized leisure economies. But it is a node thatasserts a ‘‘locality’’ within globalized, abstract networks (Wood, 2005, pp. 318–319).Things to do with FlatIron CrossingWith the word locality we are beginning to shift from an idea of ‘‘the local’’ to a visualand material rhetoric that offers users a sense of location, or a sense of where theyare in the world. In FlatIron, locality is less an assertion of an authentic localness(whatever that might be), but instead offers a recognizable image of place, a mattering298 J. Stewart and G. Dickinson

or meaning map (Grossberg, 1992, p. 82). Locality, in this sense, is a performative, aspeech act, an enunciation rather than an ontology (see Dickinson & Maugh, 2004,pp. 266–267; Morris, 1998, pp. 109–111). Locality is created precisely through thecitational practices of enunciation. The designers of FlatIron Crossing and Village citeother sites=sights in their struggle to carve out a meaningful place from a welter ofabstract relations. They cite the visual vocabulary of nature and of recreation thatis always already constructed. Indeed, the ski towns are themselves lifestyle centers—or, what Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Sidler, & Tipton (1985) call lifestyleenclaves—19 that cite previous simulations of older cowboy towns (in the case ofSteamboat Springs) or European resorts (in the case of Vail and Aspen). The imagesof the natural and of recreation are constantly re-circulating, interpenetrating, created,re-created, and aggregated.This enunciation of locality—that is the assertion of the image of place—is notunique to FlatIron Crossing. Indeed, it is very precisely this image of place thatmarks emergent lifestyle centers. Designed as urban oases in the midst of suburbansprawl, lifestyle centers assert a more ‘‘authentic’’ shopping experience. In lifestylecenters like The District in suburban Las Vegas, Desert Ridge Marketplace in suburbanPhoenix, Centera in suburban Denver and The Shoppes at Arbor Lakes insuburban Minneapolis, the centers offer outdoor, interestingly designed architecturethat attempts to provide a sense of place in the no-place of suburbia.20 Journalistsreporting on the rise of lifestyle centers call them ‘‘cozy’’ and assert that theylook like ‘‘city streets’’ (Bhatnager, 2005; Blum, 2005). As Blum argues, lifestylecenters are less concerned with evoking a lost past and more interested in creatingan imagined urban space or city street.21 The crucial rhetorical mode, then, is theattempt to recall the bustling main streets of small town America or the energy ofthe great cities.But the place references made by designers of lifestyle centers can be quite varied.Desert Ridge Marketplace offers a vision of what a Southwest city might be like withadobe walls, palm trees, and desert-hued color schemes. On the other hand, theMonteLago which anchors the luxury development at Lake Las Vegas east of Las Vegas,is a transplanted Mediterranean village with wandering Renaissance streets, tiledroofs, and Italian style tratorias.22 And so, while nearly all lifestyle centers struggleto offer images of locality, some are more thoroughgoing in their efforts. Explorationof the particular visions of locality can begin to point us to the valuesimplicit in each particular site: to simply assert that lifestyle centers offer imagesof locality does little to explain the why and how a particular site creates affectiveand effective rhetorical inducements.In Margaret Morse’s (1990) essay ‘‘An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: TheFreeway, the Mall, and Television,’’ she draws her inspiration to intersect these threeapparently separate ‘‘environments’’ from Michel de Certeau. It is de Certeau, sheargues, who, with his notion of a walking rhetoric, his place=space distinction, andhis use of enunciation to make sense of pedestrian practices, refuses to draw distinctboundaries among the written, the built, and the visual. And yet, Morse argues,de Certeau’s conceptualization of enunciation as an escape from landscapes ofWestern Journal of Communication 299domination or a space of self-empowerment is a product of a particular, prepostmodernmoment.For Morse (1990), the experience of postmodernity—what she calls ‘‘distraction’’—‘‘is based upon the representation of space within place . . . and the inclusionof (for de Certeau, liberating) elsewheres and elsewhens in the here and now’’ (p. 195).Malls, freeways, and television offer both the stabilities of place and representationsof the self-empowerment of space encoded into the built environment. Certainly, the

built environment and other forms of visual culture interpenetrate but they do so inways that colonize the libratory aspects of enunciation.23 In particular, for Morse, allthree ontologies (mall, television, and freeway) are nonplaces, separated in fairly radicalways from the materialities of place. Malls, she writes are ‘‘‘completely separatedfrom the rest of the world’’’ (p. 197).Our analysis of FlatIron Crossing and our brief exploration of other lifestylecenters confirms and modifies Morse’s (1990) sense that the resistive possibilitiesof enunciation have been colonized. On the one hand, Morse is writing veryprecisely about the older mall—the mall that seems set down from nowhere, enclosedfrom the outside, and separated from its (sub)urban setting by a sea of asphalt. Likethe nonplaces of which Morse writes, FlatIron Crossing is profoundly fluid, itdemonstrates and revels in ‘‘‘liquidity,’ [in] the exchange of values between differentontological levels and otherwise incommensurable facets of life . . . between language,images, and the built environment, and between economic, societal, and symbolicrealms of our culture’’ (p. 194).And yet, FlatIron Crossing is very much of its place. It is not ‘‘completely separatedfrom the rest of the world’’ (Morse, 1990, p. 197). Indeed, the postmodernityof elsewhere and elsewhen of which Morse writes is precisely the postmodernityFlatIron’s hybridity rejects. Yes, the mall is set in a sea of asphalt. Yes, it is built inthe midst of a wholly new suburb. And yet, it is also rooted in its place. It invitesthe outside in, and takes the inside out. Its interpenetration of visual resources,cultural contours, and economic activities, is not designed simply to extend its visitorsalong globalized networks, but suture them into a seemingly authentic Coloradolandscape. It is a postmodern escape from the excess of the postmodernity of the endof the last century.But FlatIron Crossing’s rejection of the placelessness of the post-WWII mallthrough its assertion of locality does indeed attempt to colonize the ‘‘elsewheres’and ‘‘elsewhens’’ in which de Certeau (1984) finds agency in the everyday. FlatIronCrossing, a site of consumption, offers images of other places—mountains, trails,ski lodges, main streets—as comforting assertions of locality. The designers accountfor users’ desires to read the modernist landscape back into a more ‘‘pedestrian,’’more banal, and more individualized space. In place of the straight, linear walkway, it offers curves, and nooks, and comfortable seats. Instead of the efficienciesof tile floors or the predictability of electric lighting it offers rough-hewn stoneand skylights. In short, FlatIron not only offers resources from which users canenunciate their own identities, FlatIron Crossing draws from users’ ‘‘walking rhetorics’’to create—to enunciate—locality.300 J. Stewart and G. DickinsonThis postmodern response to postmodernity is captured by one critic who calledFlatIron Crossing ‘‘Norman Rockwell’s mega-mall’’ (Sokol, 2002, p. 10). FlatIronoffers a return to Rockwell’s homespun values, his small-town images. And crucially,as this critic implies, these homespun values are not universal. The Colorado lifestyleoffered at FlatIron Crossing is not available or compelling to all Coloradoans. It is,instead, a very specific lifestyle that draws on and creats a middle-class, White landscape.Offered for sale is a very particular sense of place rooted in an imagined time,space, and a carefully defined social network. Here, FlatIron Crossing asserts, visitorscan at once partake in the goods of global culture and relax in the comforts of carefullydrawn place. The mall is at once here and there, now and then (de Certeau, 1984,p. 99; Morris, 1998, p. 64). FlatIron’s double enunciation shapes the practices of itspatrons through designed space while creating a conversation about postmodern suburban

consumer life through material elements. It is in these moments and this placeof postmodernity that place itself has become an image of consumption, a consumer’simage.And these images of place are images of difference. But the varieties of localitiescreated and represented are built on top of homogeneity. Each new lifestylecenter offers new visions of locality—here an Italian lakeside village, there a skilodge. Yet each is offering, in a more general sense, the same thing—a consumable,walkable, enunciable image of locality wrought from the fragmentation ofpostmodernity. As spaces of postmodern capitalism, we ought not be surprisedthat these are technologies that produce consumable images of difference inwhich to enact, perform, and walk homogeneity. Lifestyle centers assert, likethe arrow on the shopping center’s directory, ‘‘you are here.’’ But the ‘‘here’’is nothing more—and nothing less—than a node in the networks of globalizedcapitalism. Drawing on the globalized resources fundamental to the world againstwhich FlatIron Crossing and its compatriots react, these places offer localityin place of the local, images of the city in place of the profound difficultiesof city living, the excitement of difference in place of a confrontation withdiversity itself.Notes[1] While the suburbs demand, depend on, and make possible private consumption, they alsorely on huge public investments in infrastructure, tax breaks, and other inducements tobuilding and buying homes. The postwar suburban boom depended, for example, on thebuilding of the interstate highway system (Hayden, 2003). In postwar America, suburbsboomed in an intersection of consumer growth, governments’ support of road buildingand tax breaks, and an increasingly racialized and classed fear of urban streets (Cohen,1996; Fishman, 1987; Hayden, 2003; Kenyon, 2004). This general economic and social historyis repeated in Broomfield, home to FlatIron Crossing. Government spending in theform of both direct financial infusions and tax breaks were crucial to funding the mall(see Obmascik, 2001; Pate, 2002; Soraghan, 1998).[2] The first unified shopping mall was Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza in 1922 (Crawford2002; Farrell 2003; Leong 2002).Western Journal of Communication 301[3] The number of essays on space in communication studies is formidable. A partiallist includes: Armada (1998); Blair (1999); Blair, Jeppeson, and Pucci (1991); Blair andMichael (1999); Blair and Michael (2004); Drzewiecka and Nakayama (1998); Flores(1996); Gallagher (1999); Gallagher (1995, pp. 109–119); Grossberg (1993); Grossberg(1996); Hasian (2004); Katriel (1994); Nakayama and Krizek (1995); Shome (2003).[4] Nakayama and Krizek (1995, p. 291). See also Jackson (1999).[5] See, in particular, Drzewiecka and Nakayama (1998); Jackson (1999); Nakayama andKrizek (1995). Drzewiecka and Nakayama make an important foray into literalizing thespatial metaphor. Their empirical study of Polish immigrants to the postmodern urbancenter of Phoenix demonstrates the ways that individuals use space to negotiate a widerange of interconnected, but not interdependent, identities through the ‘‘spatialization oftheir experiences’’ (p. 25).[6] See Grossberg (1993); Grossberg (1996); McKerrow (1999); Shome (2003).[7] See McKerrow (1999, pp. 276–277).[8] As we have been indicating, the turn to spatiality is part of the efforts to investigate themateriality of rhetoric. See McGee (1980; 1982); Cloud (1994); Greene (1998). For a more‘‘spatialized’’ view of rhetoric’s materiality see Blair (1999).[9] Now is not the time to engage in the ongoing debate over the connections betweenplace and space. Michel de Certeau (1984), famously, argued that place was settled,stable, panoptic while space was constructed in the moment by the tactics of the weak.This is a distinction that is at once helpful and hindering. On the other hand, ofcourse, Lefebvre (1991) writes about the construction of social space in which spacedoes not preexist and then humans act in space creating place. Instead, space itself isa construction of human intervention. For our purposes, we will be using space andplace in somewhat indistinguishable ways even as ‘‘place’’ should have a stronger senseof human intervention.

[10] For example, Victor Gruen, an early developer and advocate of suburban shopping malls,designed the first enclosed, climate-controlled mall in Edina, Minnesota in 1956 (Crawford,2002; Jackson, 2003). Gruen was unabashedly optimistic about the future of mallsin suburban life. He saw the suburban shopping center as the latest rendition of the communitycommons area, the modern version of the ancient agora, the medieval marketplace,the old village square, or the perfected downtown (Cohen, 1996; Rifkind, 1996;Zepp, 1997).[11] Broomfield’s homogeneity is striking in part because it is in the heart of one of the mostdiverse regions within Colorado as evidenced by the chart below.White(%)African American(%)American Indian(%)Asian(%)Other(%)Latino(%)Broomfield 88.6 1.1 1.2 4.8 4.2 9.1Region 80.6 5.4 1.5 3.6 9.0 17.7State 82.8 4.2 1.7 2.8 8.5 17.1Source: Broomfield Community Profile.[12] The economic base of Broomfield is archetypal of postmodern space building, emphasizingin particular transnational business services. On the economic restructuring of postmodernspaces see Soja (1995).[13] The first mall to be labeled a hybrid lifestyle center in the United States was the Mall ofGeorgia in Atlanta, but it is FlatIron Crossing that has been celebrated as the idealmodel for hybrid design, due in part, to its larger outdoor area (Adams, 2001; Berta,2000b).302 J. Stewart and G. Dickinson[14] Of course this Colorado lifestyle is not the lifestyle of all Coloradoans. Later in the essay,we turn to analysis of the specific audiences constructed by this discourse of the Coloradolifestyle.[15] For more on the relationship between the material rhetoric of consumer space and theemphasis on the natural, see Dickinson (2002).[16] In fact, FlatIron is marked by a remarkable number of water features that are outside themall (this is, in part, a function of the fact FlatIron is a hybrid of an outdoor ‘‘lifestyle’’center and a more traditional indoor mall).[17] We are indebted to one of the anonymous reviewers for this analysis.[18] The demographics reported in the media kits of Ski (2006), and Skiing (2006) magazinesupport these numbers.[19] Writing about ‘‘lifestyle enclaves,’’ Bellah et al. (1985) argue that ‘‘whereas communityattempts to be an inclusive whole, celebrating the interdependence of public and privatelife and the different callings of all, lifestyle is fundamentally segmental and celebratesthe narcissism of similarity’’ (p. 72).[20] We choose these particular examples for two reasons. First, they are typical examples of lifestylecenters. Second, and more importantly, they are life style centers we have visited asconsumers and as researchers.[21] A number of economic considerations foster the growth of lifestyle centers, not the least ofwhich is that lifestyle centers take less land that does a more traditional, superregional mall.This makes it easier for developers to site a carefully focused, up-scale shopping districtclose to exclusive neighborhoods (Bhatnagar, 2005).[22] Although, in the best traditions of postmodern retail planning, this Italianate landscape alsoembeds an Irish pub that proudly serves Guinness.[23] Though he does not cite Morse, Victor Burgin (1996) calls this fragmented interpenetrationof contemporary visual culture ‘‘television’’ (p. 23). Not surprisingly, Burgin is indebted toboth Morris and de Certeau.References

Adams, J. (2001, February). Sandstone creates the feel of the Rockies. Stoneworld. Retrieved January4, 2005, from http://www.stoneworld.comALC Data. Mailing List. (n.d.) Retrieved Ocober 2, 2007. http://search.alcdata.com/market;jsessionid=66032D4C1A12FE70250D4264B8BD55C9?page=research/datacard&id=86984Archer, J. (2005). Architecture and suburbia: From English villa to American dream house, 1690–2000.Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.Armada, B. J. (1998). Memorial agon: An interpretive tour of the National Civil Rights Museum.Southern Communication Journal, 63, 235–243.Barthes, R. (1972). Mythologies. New York: Hill and Wang.Bellah, R. N., Madsen, R., Sullivan, W. M., Sidler, A., & Tipton, S. M. (1985). Habits of the heart:Individualism and commitment in American life. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Berman, M. (1982). All that is solid melts into air: The experience of modernity. New York: PenguinBooks.Berta, D. (2000a, April 19). Mall’s design excites architects. Rocky Mountain News, 5B. RetrievedJanuary 4, 2005, from http: www.lexisnexis.com.Berta, D. (2000b, June 25). Mall ingenuity knowing area shoppers, getting right retailers central toFlatIron’s design. Rocky Mountain News, p. 4G. Retrieved January 4, 2005, from http://www.lexisnexis.comBhatnagar, Parija. (2005, January 12). ‘‘Not a mall, it’s a lifestyle center: Developers are embracingthese cozy, high-end urban centers in lieu of traditional big box formats.’’ CNNMoney.com.Western Journal of Communication 303Retrieved September 10, 2007. http://money.cnn.com/2005/01/11/news/fortune500/retail_lifestylecenter/Blair, C. (1999). Contemporary U.S. memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric’s materiality. InJ. Selzer & S. Crowley (Eds.), Rhetorical bodies (pp. 16–57). Madison, WI: University ofWisconsin Press.Blair, C., Jeppeson, M., & Pucci, E. (1991). Public memorializing in postmodernity: The VietnamVeterans Memorial as prototype. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 77, 263–288.Blair, C. & Michael, N. (1999). Commemorating in the theme park zone: Reading the astronautsmemorial. In T. Rosteck (Ed.), At the intersection: Cultural studies and rhetorical studies(pp. 29–83). New York: Guilford Press.Blair, C. & Michael, N. (2004). The Rushmore effect: Ethos and national collective memory. In J. M.Hyde (Ed.), The ethos of rhetoric (pp. 158–196). Columbia, SC: University of South CarolinaPress.Blakely, E. J. & Snyder, M. G. (1997). Fortress America: Gated communities in the United States.Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press.Blum, A. (2005, April 6). The mall goes undercover: It now looks like a city street. Slate. RetrievedSeptember 10, 2006.Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice. (R. Nice, Trans.). Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.Bowlby, R. (1985). Just looking: Consumer culture in Dreiser, Gissing, and Zola. New York: Methuen.Brady, J. (2005, March 30). Skiing industry’s latest attempts to draw more ethnic minorities to thesport. National Public Radio. Transcript. Retrieved April 3, 2005, from http://www.lexisnexis.comBroomfield Community Profile. (n.d.). Retrieved July 13, 2005, from http: //www.drcog.org/communityprofiles/PDFs/CCofBroomfield.pdf?CFID=424501&CFTOKEN=42289225Broomfield Population Growth. (n.d.). Retrieved July 13, 2005, from http://www.ci.broomfield.co.us/planning/demographics/POP&EMPDATA1.pdfBuck-Morss, S. (1995). The city as dreamworld and catastrophe. October, 73, 3–26.Burgin, V. (1996). In=Different spaces. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.Clapson, M. (2003). Suburban century: Social change and urban growth in England and the UnitedStates. Oxford, UK: Berg.Climbing Media Kit. (2006). Retrieved September 25, 2007. http://www.skrammedia.com/demographics/climbing.htmlCloud, D. (1994). The materiality of discourse as oxymoron: A challenge to critical rhetoric.Western Journal of Communication, 58, 141–163.Cohen, L. (1996). From town center to shopping center: The reconfiguration of communitymarketplaces in postwar America. The American Historical Review, 101, 1050–1081.Collins, J. (1995). Architectures of excess: Cultural life in the Information Age. New York:Routledge.Crawford, M. (2002). Suburban life and public space. In D. Smiley (Ed.), Sprawl and public space:

Redressing the mall (pp. 21–30). New York: Princeton Architectural Press.De Certeau, M. (1984). The practice of everyday life (S. Randall, Trans.). Berkeley, CA: University ofCalifornia Press.Dear, M. (1995). Beyond the Post-Fordist city. Contention, 5, 67–76.Dickinson, G. (2002). Joe’s rhetoric: Finding authenticity at Starbucks. Rhetoric Society Quarterly,32(4), 5–27.Dickinson, G. & Maugh, C. M. (2004). Placing visual rhetoric: Finding material comfort in WildOats Market. In C. A. Hill & M. Helmers (Eds.), Defining visual rhetorics (pp. 259–276).Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Drzewiecka, J. & Nakayama, T. K. (1998). City sites: Postmodern urban space and communicationof identity. Southern Communication Journal, 64, 20–31.304 J. Stewart and G. DickinsonEllin, N. (1997). Shelter from the storm or form follows fear and vice versa. In N. Ellin (Ed.),Architecture of fear (pp. 13–45). New York: Princeton Architectural Press.Farrell, J. J. (2003). One nation under goods: Malls and the seductions of American shopping.Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books.Fishman, R. (1987). Bourgeois utopias: The rise and fall of suburbia. New York: Basic Books.FlatIron Crossing fun facts!. (2005). 2005 Shopping and Dining Incentives. [Booklet]. MacerichCompany.Flores, L. A. (1996). Creating discursive space through a rhetoric of difference: Chicana feministscraft a homeland. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 82, 142–15.Gallagher, V. J. (1995). Remembering together: Rhetorical integration and the case of the MartinLuther King, Jr. Memorial. Southern Communication Journal, 60, 109–119.Gallagher, V. J. (1999). Memory and reconciliation in the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.Rhetoric and Public Affairs, 2, 303–320.Garreau, J. (1991). Edge city: Life on the new frontier. New York: Doubleday.Giddens, A. (1991). Modernity and self identity: Self and society in the late Modern Age. Stanford, CA:Stanford University Press.Greene, R. W. (1998). Another materialist rhetoric. Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 15,21–41.Grossberg, L. (1992). We gotta get out of this place: Popular conservatism and postmodern culture.New York: Routledge.Grossberg, L. (1993). Cultural studies and=in new worlds. Critical Studies in Mass Communication,10, 1–22.Grossberg, L. (1996). The space culture, the culture of space. In I. Chambers & L. Curti (Eds.), Thepost-colonial question: Common skies, divided horizons (pp. 169–188). London: Routledge.Harvey, D. (1989). The condition of postmodernity: An enquiry into the origins of cultural change.Cambridge, UK: Blackwell.Hasian, M., Jr. (2004). Remembering and forgetting the ‘‘final solution’’: A rhetorical pilgrimagethrough the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Critical Studies in Media Communication,21, 64–92.Hayden, D. (2003). Building suburbia: Green fields and urban growth, 1820–2000. New York:Pantheon Books.Jackson, K. T. (2003). All the world’s a mall: Reflections on the social and economic consequencesof the American shopping center. In J. Lewis & T. Miller (Eds.), Critical cultural policy studies(pp. 327–334). Malden, MA: Blackwell.Jackson, R. L., II. (1999). White space, white privilege: Mapping discursive inquiry into the self.Quarterly Journal of Speech, 85, 36–54.Jencks, C. (1987). The language of post-modern architecture (5th ed.). New York: Rizzoli.Jordan, Miriam. (2005, January 2). Seekin’ growth, ski areas starting to target minorities.’’ DesertMorning News. Retrieved April 4, 2005, from http://www.lexisnexis.comKatriel, T. (1994). Sites of memory: Discourses of the past in Israeli Pioneering SettlementMuseums. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 80, 1–20.Kenyon, A. M. (2004). Dreaming suburbia: Detroit and the production of postwar space and culture.Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.Lefebvre, H. (1991). The social production of space (D. Nicholson-Smith, Trans.). Oxford, UK:Blackwell.Leong, S. T. (2002). Evolution of shopping. In C. Grunenberg & M. Hollein (Eds.), Shopping(pp. 80–83). Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz Publishers.Marchand, R. (1985). Advertising the American Dream: Making way for modernity, 1920–1940.Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

McGee, M. C. (1980). The ‘ideograph:’ A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly Journal ofSpeech, 66, 1–16.Western Journal of Communication 305McGee, M. C. (1982). A materialist’s conception of rhetoric (pp. 23–48). Explorations in rhetoric:Studies in honor of Douglas Ehninger. Dallas, TX: Scott, Foresman and Company.McKerrow, R. E. (1999). Space and time in the postmodern polity. Western Journal of Communication,2, 272–290.Medina, J. (2004, August 6). FlatIron Crossing invites parents, kids to play; outdoor fun area builtto capitalize on fine weather. The Denver Post, J6.Meinig, D. W. (Ed.). (1979). Symbolic landscapes: Some idealizations of American communities.The interpretation of ordinary landscapes: Geographical essays (pp. 164–192). Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press.Morris, M. (1998). Too soon too late: History in popular culture. Bloomington, IN: IndianaUniversity Press.Morse, M. (1990). An ontology of everyday distraction: The freeway, the mall, and television. InP. Mellencamp (Ed.), Logics of television: Essays in cultural criticism (pp. 193–221).Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.Nakayama, T. K. & Krizek, R. L. (1995). Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric. Quarterly Journal of Speech,81, 291–309.National Geographic Adventure Media Kit. (2006). Retrieved October 2, 2007. http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/images/adventure-media-kit-2007.pdfObmascik, M. (2001, April 16). Mall subsidy tops $279 million; prospect of FlatIron riches ledBroomfield to deal. The Denver Post, A1. Retrieved April 30, 2005, from www.denverpost.comOutstanding thematic project, where nature meets commerce. (2001, May 1). Shopping center world.Retrieved January 4, 2005, from http://www.keepmedia.com/Pate, K. (2000a, January 25). New Broomfield mall moving right along. The Denver Post, C1.Retrieved January 4, 2005, from http://www.lexisnexis.comPate, K. (2000b, August 6). Shifts in the shopping landscape FlatIron Crossing set to begin servingNorth Metro area. The Denver Post, J1. Retrieved January 4, 2005, from http://www.lexisnexis.comPate, K. (2002, November 10). Mall deal with Broomfield works despite lower sales. The DenverPost, K4. Retrieved January 4, 2005, from http://www.lexisnexis.comPate, K. (2004, August 11). Not just a mall, FlatIron a ‘lifestyle center’ design aims to offer comfort,adventure. The Denver Post, C1. Retrieved January 4, 2005, from http://www.lexisnexis.comPorter Benson, S. (1986). Counter cultures: Saleswomen, mangers, and customers in American departmentstores, 1890–1940. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.Rifkind, C. (1996). America’s fantasy urbanism: The waxing of the mall and the waning of civility. InK. Washburn & J. F. Thorton (Eds.), Dumbing down (pp. 261–269). New York: W. W. Norton.Shome, R. (2003). Space matters: The power and practice of space. Communication Theory, 13,39–56.Silverstone, R. (Ed.). (1997). Visions of suburbia. London: Routledge.Sokol, D. (2002, October). Morphing mega malls. Shopping center world, 10. Retrieved January 4,2005, from http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb279/is_200210/ai_n8184530Soraghan, M. (1998, June 11). Broomfield gives $79 million to mall. The Denver Post, B3. RetrievedJanuary 4, 2005, from http://www.lexisnexis.comSorkin, M. (Ed.). (1992). See you in Disneyland. Variations on a theme park: The new American cityand the end of public space (pp. 205–232). New York: Noonday Press.Spitzack, C. (1993). The spectacle of anorexia nervosa. Text and Performance Quarterly, 13,1–20.Stormer, N. (2004). Addressing the sublime: Space, mass representation, and the unpresentable.Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21(3), 212–240.Vidler, A. (1992). The architectural uncanny: Essays in the modern unhomely. Cambridge, MA: MITPress.306 J. Stewart and G. DickinsonWiese, A. (1999): The other suburbanites: African American suburbanization in the North before1950. The Journal of American History, 85, 1495–1524.Wood, A. F. (2005). ‘‘What Happens [in Vegas]’’: Performing the post-tourist flaˆneur in ‘‘NewYork’’ and ‘‘Paris.’’ Text and Performance Quarterly, 25, 315–333.

Zepp, I. G. (1997). The new religious image of urban America. Niwot, CO: University Press ofColorado.Western Journal of Communication 307