This is not one of 50 Posts About Cyborgs, but it owes much to the series.

The mall is a cybernetic garden at the crossroads of suburbia. It exists as a reconstructed island of metropolitan density in an environment hostile to it. Suburban houses are on a relatively human scale, but suburbia is not. Suburbia in the large is the domain of the automobile.

The city and the mall are cybernetic in that they are self-regulating human structures which take on environmental management in a way that makes it unconscious to users. The mall air conditioning is a clue. With cybernetics we change our environment; as cyborgs we change ourselves.

An informative exercise for those wanting to discover this island of density is to cross a shopping mall car park by foot on a summer’s day. It is striking what a brutally awkward space it is. It is at the intersection of car and person, hostile to both.

The most excellent mall entrance from a carpark I have seen is at Suntec City Plaza in Singapore. As in many Brisbane shopping centres, the underground carpark leads into a large stairwell for the escalators up into the main set of shops. At Suntec City they have expanded the space and included a massive pond. Large Chinese goldfish and carp swish through the water, easing the stress of bustling and queueing that is mall and carpark existence. Small waterfalls provide white noise cover for engines revving in low gear downstairs and muzak upstairs. The water garden of lilypads and shrubs scrub the air of exhaust fumes. The glass of the automatic doors reflect the tranquility into an imaginary middle distance. Fish ponds are not unusual in Singapore, but the enervating context makes this one an underground Hanging Garden of Babylon.

I have more affection for the entrance than the rest of Suntec City, which is otherwise a graceless sprawl of one way escalators and cavernous halls segregated from the metro system (until very recently). It is a confusing space, twisty but without organic paths of use, where assistants have to be paid to accompany the standing maps, as a rescue service for beleaguered shoppers.

More common is placing a mall above an MRT station. Crossroads are common precursors to markets. The intersection of needs is already in place.

City is a recurring suffix for malls in Singapore – Great World City, Turf City, Vivo City – which is a curious intensifying suffix to use in a country which is already a city-state. City in Chinese is 城市, literally a wall plus a market. A mall, too, is that.

To conclude, or perhaps, to make manifest:

The city is a self-regulating human modification for surviving hostile environments.

The mall is a type of internal city which attempts to modify humans to survive the hostile environments of cities.

The inner city and the outer suburbs can both be hostile environments.

Where the city itself is a savannah for metropolitan cyborgs, the mall-spaceship can be dismantled.

The natural environment of man is yet to be built.
— John Powers