In Latin America, shopping malls seem to offer an open, safe and democratic version of the public space. However, it is often difficult to quantitatively measure whether they indeed foster, hinder, or are neutral with respect to social inclusion. In this work, we investigate if, and by how much, people from different social classes are attracted by the same malls. Using a dataset of mobile phone network records from 387,152 devices identified as customers of 16 malls in Santiago de Chile, we performed several analyses to study whether malls with higher social mixing attract more people. Our pipeline, which starts with the socio-economic characterization of mall visitors, includes the estimation of social mixing and diversity of malls, the application of the gravity model of mobility, and the definition of a co-visitation model. Results showed that people tend to choose a profile of malls more in line with their own socio-economic status and the distance from their home to the mall, and that higher mixing does positively contribute to the process of choosing a mall. We conclude that (a) there is social mixing in malls, and (b) that social mixing is a factor at the time of choosing which mall to go to. Thus, the potential for social mixing in malls could be capitalized by designing public policies regarding transportation and mobility to make some malls strong social inclusion hubs.
The effects of malls in urban societies in the U.S. have been extensively studied in the literature of the social sciences. Among the most prominent works, L. Cohen studied their emergence in the context of suburbanization @cite_29 ; J. Goss depicted them as new civic spaces that manipulate behavior through the configuration of space, in order to provoke dispositions and facilitate consumption @cite_10 ; Wakefield and Baker have applied factor analysis to identify the determinants of customer excitement @cite_27 . O'Reilly measured the effects of mall size and distance on mall selection and proposed the Law of Retail Gravitation: he suggested that larger retail centers present a higher attraction to customers, who would be willing to travel longer distances to arrive to them @cite_35 ; Huff studied the concept of trading area and proposed a model for defining the catchment area of a retail center @cite_2 .
@cite_35 @cite_29 @cite_27 @cite_2 @cite_10
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WHEN THE EDITORS OF TIME MAGAZINE set out to tell readers in an early January 1965 cover story why the American economy had flourished during the previous year, they explained it in terms that had become the conventional wisdom of postwar America. The most prosperous twelve months ever, capping the country's fourth straight year of economic expansion, were attributable to the American consumer, "who continued spending as if there were no tomorrow." According to Time's economics lesson, consumers, business, and government "created a nonvicious circle: spending created more production, production created wealth, wealth created more spending." In this simplified Keynesian model of economic growth, "the consumer is the key to our economy." As R. H. Macy's board chair Jack Straus explained to Time's readers, "When the country has a recession, it suffers not so much from problems of production as from problems of consumption." And in prosperous times like today, "Our economy keeps growing because our ability to consume is endless. The consumer goes on spending regardless of how many possessions he has. The luxuries of today are the necessities of tomorrow." A demand economy built on mass consumption had brought the United States out of the doldrums of the Great Depression and World War II, and its strength in the postwar period continued to impress those like retail magnate Straus whose own financial future depended on it.1 Although Straus and his peers invested great energy and resources in developing new strategies for doing business in this mass-consumption economy, historians Abstract Competition between malls and newer forms of shopping centers has led mall developers and management to consider alternative methods to build excitement with customers. In this study, we examine the relationship between three factors (tenant variety, mall environment and shopping involvement) on shoppers' excitement and desire to stay at a mall. Results show that the three factors have a differential influence on excitement and desire to stay, which in turn are found to influence repatronage intentions and outshopping. What are the conceptual properties of a trading area?What is the definition of the term?What testable propositions are currently available to validate its properties and thus give precision to the definition?This article gives answers to these questions. Abstract Shopping is the most important contemporary social activity, and, for the most part, takes place in the shopping center. Developers and designers of the retail built environment exploit the power of place and an intuitive understanding of the structuration of space to facilitate consumption and thus the realization of retail profits. They strive to present an alternative rationale for the shopping center's existence, manipulate shoppers' behavior through the configuration of space, and consciously design a symbolic landscape that provokes associative moods and dispositions in the shopper. These strategies are examined to obtain an understanding of how the retail built environment works, and how we might work against it.