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Malls became antidotes to the typically isolated and alienating spaces of suburbia: lonely stretches of highway and echoey McMansions. There we congregate and the worries of the world disappear into the thrum of Muzak and met expectations -- they are their own gated communities.

"We're living on a planet that's going to hell in a handbag," said architect and architectural critic Michael Sorkin. "At the mall, you enter a condition of perfect climate control, where it's clean and orderly and you are not forced in any way to confront reality."