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The world of the shopping mall has become a 
template for the whole world, Margaret Crawford, 
a Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and 
Director of the Department of Urban Design at 
Berkeley, concluded in her 1992 contribution to 
Variations on a Theme Park.1 The book, edited by 
the architect Michael Sorkin, offers a collection of 
alarming articles, investigating how commercial 
interests, economic principles, and consumerist 
perspectives shape contemporary cities. Sorkin 
presents it apocalyptically: ‘the end of public space.’ 
As he announces in his introduction: this is an 
alarming perspective, as public space is directly 
related to the issue of democracy, the interaction, the 
possibility of protests, the proximity of otherness, 
the existence of fringes.2 Crawford’s opening article 
examines the development and features of malls and 
mall life. Her concluding argument is made up out 
of the observation that also existing cities and their 
downtowns, even such classical and medieval cities 
as Florence and Rouen, as well as public or cultural 
venues, like museums, transform according to mall 
logics. The conclusion fits well in the book, as it 
underlines the narrative of loss. What if the whole 
world transforms along the lines of mall principles? 

Crawford is amongst the rare thinkers that 
are able to publicly rethink and criticize the own 
conclusions. A few years after her contribution to 
Variations on a Theme Park, she published an article 
in the Journal of Architectural Education wherein 
she clearly distances herself from the narrative of 
loss which had influenced her work previously. In 
“Contesting the Public Realm: Struggles over Public 
Space in Los Angeles” she writes that this idea of 

A Site of Struggle. 
Interview with 
Margaret Crawford

Hans Teerds



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loss is “derived from extremely narrow and normative definitions of both 
public and space,” while, “the meaning of concepts such as public, space, 
democracy, and citizenship are continually being redefined in practice 
through lived experience.”3 In the article she not only propels to approach 
consumerist spaces less pessimistically, but also writes about other practices 
of consumption less defined by the principles of capitalism, and closer 
to an everyday occupation of public life, such as street vending. This 
perspective she makes even more clear in the important book Everyday 
Urbanism, which she edited together with John Chase and John Kaliski.4  
Her own contribution to this book, the article “Blurring the Boundaries,” 
underlines how everyday spaces are still spaces of struggle, occupation, 
adaptation, and appropriation.5 As such these spaces still raise important 
political questions about both citizenship and economic participation. 
This perspective thus is much more optimistic about the vitality of public 
space as stage of the political dimension of the world. From “Contesting 
the Public Realm” onwards, the work of Crawford is clearly based on new 
insight, a new perception of the world which is more hopeful and less 
pessimistic. In this the following interview, I questioned Crawford on 
this moment of change in her thinking: how does she look back on her 
contribution to Variations on a Theme Park, why did she change her mind, 
and how does she read the situation of public space today?  

MC: The tone of my original article was hugely influenced by Michael 
Sorkin. When I was asked to contribute, the working title of the book was 
Variations on a Theme Park: Scenes From the New American City. This was a 
very non-judgmental title, a survey of what was happening in the American 
urban landscape. Later, the subtitle was changed to The End of Public 
Space, a title that did not sit well with me. However, Michael encouraged 
every contributor to have a pessimistic and even a slightly apocalyptic take 
on what we were investigating. There were two important philosophers 
who were influencing the debate at the time: Jean Baudrillard, with his 
concept of hyperreality, and Jürgen Habermas, with his idea of the loss of 
the public sphere. 

In the article I contributed to the volume, public space does not play 
an important part. The real contribution of that article to contemporary 
discourse is the discussion of the financing and organization of mall 
development.

While preparing the article, I went to many shopping malls, pretty 
much nonstop, for several months. It was at the high point of shopping 
mall development in the United States and Canada, the early nineties 
were a prosperous decade of consumption in the US. Visiting all these 



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malls definitely shaped my perception, as well as 
my conclusion that the mall had conquered the 
entire world. Once you get engaged in this narrative 
of loss, you don’t see signs that something else is 
happening. Lots of changes were lurking slightly 
under the surface, and I didn’t see them. But what I 
recognized in that narrative is that the mall concept, 
in which scripting and theming played an important 
role, was also expanding beyond the mall, to other 
domains of commercial and cultural life. Scripting 
and theming, for instance, became part of the 
design of museums and airports too. 

The concern about these mechanisms applied to 
public space and cultural venues is a concern about 
authenticity and authentic experiences. But once 
you start thinking about what is real and what is 
fantasy, the entire concept of authenticity vanishes. 
It is actually a moral response, an upper-middle-class 
concern that they used to differentiate themselves as 
informed and aware people who don’t go to malls 
and spurn Disneyland, from the rest of the populace, 
who enjoy them. It is an apparently leftist critique 
that actually serves to maintain class distinctions. I 
now read my contribution to Variations on a Theme 
Park as a response to a particular moment in time, 
influenced by a particular kind of leftist alarm, a 
moral panic about what was going on in the built 
environment. It was written in an ambience linked 
to inexorable narratives of consumerism, exploding 
marketing and a constantly expanding capitalism. 
In this situation, it is assumed that there is nothing 
you can do, except write critical articles.

But soon after my article, the circumstances 
changed. Slowly but slightly, still continuing until 
today, many malls have become obsolete and have 
been demolished. New malls are rarely being built. 
Over the past decade, this change has certainly been 
propelled with the increase of online shopping. 
However, this trend also has led to a paradoxical 
new appreciation of the mall, because many people 
now go to malls more for public interaction rather 

    THE ACTUAL 
MEANING OF THE 

RELATIONSHIP 
BETWEEN 

CONSUMPTION 
AND PUBLIC 

LIFE SEEMS TO 
BE CHANGING 

DRAMATICALLY.

“

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than to actually buy something. Physical shopping can be understood as a 
positive force shaping public space, as compared to online shopping from 
home. So, the actual meaning of the relationship between consumption 
and public life seems to be changing dramatically. But this does not mean 
that I am less concerned about the privatization of public space. There are 
still urban spaces being developed and built where commerce dominates 
public space. Take for instance the Hudson Yards in New York, or in 
Los Angeles, The Americana at Brand, which are, I would argue, a new 
typology of shopping mall: open air shopping spaces with housing above 
the shops. It differs from historic downtown districts or the medieval 
centers of cities in Europe, where people also lived (and still live) above 
shops in shopping streets. But where these streets are part and parcel of 
a continuous urban public space, the urban fabric, these new spaces are 
detached from the surrounding urban spaces. As such, these spaces still 
follow the mall typology. The residents of the apartments thus are really 
living within the confines of the shopping mall. Their public space is totally 
commercialized. How do they experience these spaces, I wonder? Do they 
accept it as their own town square? This new typology does show that 
privatization has not stopped at all. In fact, Hudson Yards is an extreme 
example of privatization.      

HT: This example of the new mall typology shows that the concern about 
the totalizing impact of commercialization on public space is still valid and 
urgent. Nevertheless, you also maintain that the mall can actually provide 
a public space, which is meaningful for particular groups in society. How 
did you change your view upon malls? And how did that also urge you 
to examine public life and commercial activities in actual streets, outside 
malls?

MC: There were several reasons. One was a critique of my mall article by 
philosopher Marshall Berman. He simply said: ‘she’s never been shopping.’ 
That was not true at all! As I visited malls for professional reasons, I also 
enjoyed them as a shopper. Every time I went to a mall, I came out with a 
bag in my hand. Berman’s critique showed me that my allegedly objective 
analysis actually discounted my own experience in malls. This led me to 
think more about different mall experiences. I also read feminist political 
philosophers, such as Nancy Fraser. Her critique of Habermas’s idea of 
the public sphere emphasizes the existence of multiple publics and the 
impossibility of a single all-embracing ‘public.’6 This leads to the idea that 
there is no universal public space, but many publics and many spaces. I 
realized that malls are different for different groups. Some offer a safe space 
for mothers with children and others are great hangouts for teenagers. 



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Security and safety are issues of great concern to 
these groups. The universal, male-oriented concept 
of public space that is the dominant perspective in 
Variations on a Theme Park, overlooks and dismisses 
this important dimension of malls. 

It also became clear to me that that mall-life 
cannot be reduced to just consuming. Malls offer 
many different types of publicness. I understood 
that part of the problem with my previous reading 
of mall life was the very modernist dichotomy or 
binary between public and private. But there are 
many gradations of publicness and privateness. If 
you accept this spectrum, you start to see how the 
mall provides a quasi-public space. It has dimensions 
of publicness, as well as of privateness. The moment 
you accept the mall as quasi-public space, you can 
also start to recognize similar quasi-public spaces 
in the city, outside the mall. Right across the street 
from my house in Hollywood at the time, there 
were people putting rugs on chain link fences and 
selling them to drivers passing by. This was a very 
different kind of commerce. It demonstrated very 
clearly that public space had not ended at all. The 
problem was too narrow definitions of both public 
and space.  

In the meantime, I also started to read French 
philosophers and theorists, like Henri Lefebvre, 
with his formulation of ‘the right to the city’. He 
believed that ‘everyday life’ was a crucial lens for 
understanding society. My reading of his work was 
extremely selective, emphasizing only the positive 
part and ignoring the rest. But what I saw out there 
in the city of Los Angeles was an amazing array of 
everyday practices. Immigrants would take over 
an empty parking lot after people went home at 
night, set out tables with checkered tablecloths to 
serve food like it was their home. I saw how these 
practices were also political struggles. For example, 
the day laborers, who stand on the street outside 
Home Depot and Brico stores. These laborers, mostly 
Mexican and Central American immigrants, wait 

    THERE ARE 
MANY GRADATIONS 

OF PUBLICNESS 
AND PRIVATENESS. 

IF YOU ACCEPT 
THIS SPECTRUM, 

YOU START TO SEE 
HOW THE MALL 

PROVIDES A QUASI-
PUBLIC SPACE.

“

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there to be picked up for work. Home Depot tried to get rid of them, but 
due to an enormous organizing effort, the jornaleros acquired the right to 
be there. They carried signs stating ‘The right to work is a human right.’ 
The stores even had to provide bathrooms and other services for them. For 
me, this was extremely positive: it showed me that human agency is still 
possible, and that there are many different politics of public space. 

At the same time, although there were street vendors everywhere, street 
vending was still illegal. For the vendors, this meant a constant threat that 
the police could easily shut them down and take their goods. Only two 
years ago, due to an enormous political effort and organization, which took 
30 years, they finally acquired the right to street vending in Los Angeles! 

HT: How do you understand this political struggle over the right to street 
vending with regard to the issue of public space? 

MC:  This, for me, is a clear example of what you can call ‘the right to 
public space’. This right must include, for me, the right to use public space 
as an economic space. This goes from the panhandler, who is conducting 
an economic transaction, to the day laborers standing on the street and 
selling their labor to vendors. I therefore would describe public space not 
as a static entity. It is a continuous struggle between different publics and 

groups, different practices and occupations. This is not something to erase, 
but rather something to embrace. 

Lately, I have been doing research in China on public space as well. In 
this totally different context, I recognize the same struggles as in the U.S. 
I focused on the unique condition of villages in the Pearl River Delta. 
These villages are very interesting because they are a bounded urban 

Black lives matter plaza, Washington DC (2020)



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type regulated by the government. This condition 
originates from land rights that Mao gave rural 
villages. As a result, the inhabitants of these villages 
are the only people in China who can elect their 
own village leaders and who can build their own 
houses. They are the only people who can create 
and control their physical space, although within 
certain limits. These residents thus have a surprising 
amount of agency. 

As you can imagine, this situation results in 
a contested condition. In these villages, you see a 
continuous struggle between the government and 
the people. The government is trying to control 
the villages and their residents, and impose very 
stringent regulations on public space. But the people 
are endlessly inventive in trying to get around those 
regulations. The kind of interaction between control 
and evasion of control is fascinating. 

HT: What are the important struggles over public 
space today in the United States?

MC:  Most important is the struggle to be different in 
public. A concentrated group of African Americans 
or Latinos in public space is perceived as a threat, 
while a gathering of white people is celebrated. Take 
for instance the case of a park in Oakland around 
Lake Merritt. It has become very controversial 
because numbers of African Americans assembled 
there to barbecue. In a notorious case, a white 
woman called in to complain that black people were 
barbecuing. It became a very heated environment, 
as more and more African Americans purposefully 
came there to claim the space. The situation went 
on for several months until the city shut it down. 
Such struggles are going on everywhere, all the time. 

But this particular struggle has changed in an even 
more dramatic way in the past decade. Some groups 
in our society are denied the right to be in public 
space, as the killing of Trayvon Martin, George 
Floyd and many other Black people demonstrates. 
To be in the street as an African American means 

    THE RIGHT TO 
PUBLIC SPACE 

MUST INCLUDE 
THE RIGHT TO USE 

PUBLIC SPACE 
AS AN ECONOMIC 

SPACE. 

“

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risking your life. That is the largest challenge to public space in the United 
States. It is literally a life-or-death issue. African American men, but also 
women, have not achieved the right to public space, even though the 
state guarantees it legally. Therefore, I consider the Black Lives Matter 
movement, to be the most important public space developments in the 
last 10 years.

HT: How does these struggles over public space and societal injustices 
relate to other pressing urban developments, the change of cities through 
suburbanization, gentrification and segregation?

MC: Many of these struggles and killings take place in suburban 
environments or on the highway. Trayvon Martin was killed in Stanford, 
Florida, in a suburban gated community. Michael Brown was killed 
in Fergusson, Missouri, also a suburb. Many central cities have been 
emptied out of African Americans and Latinos, from places that we 
might call ghettos, to better housing conditions in suburban locations. 
Simultaneously, central cities have become largely places for wealthier 
white people. The central city is no longer the central site of struggle over 
public space. It has become a more exclusive, controlled, and surveilled 
space. Instead, struggles over public space can happen anywhere, in any 
part of the city or outside it.  

HT: Architecture is often understood as an instrument to mediate 
between different, conflicting and opposing interests. But if public space 
is, essentially, a space characterized by struggle, mediating seems not to be 

LaFayette Square Park, Oakland CA, Walter Hood, landscape architect (1999)



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the proper intervention. How do you understand 
the agency of architecture with respect to public 
space? 

MC: That is an interesting question. One of the 
goals of Everyday Urbanism was to point out the 
physical qualities of public space, and ways of 
understanding time and space that could actually 
be useful for designers. My two co-editors, John 
Cage and John Kaliski, were both professional 
urban designers, and they really wanted to link our 
findings to practice. We formulated what was later 
borrowed by “tactical urbanism”—the idea that 
time is as important as space. Things can happen in 
one place at a certain time. But this does not mean 
that it recurs. My own contribution to the book 
focused on the physical and experiential qualities of 
domesticity found in many everyday spaces in Los 
Angeles. The qualities of ordinary materials, their 
softness, ornamentation, and human scale can all 
contribute to a sense of domesticity in public. This 
often happens as vendors offer food in homelike 
settings. In such moments the quality of materials 
and creative practices support one another, all ideas 
that designers can use to design public spaces. This 
is obviously a completely different approach than 
the designs and theories of someone like Jan Gehl, 
who, to me, represents what I would call ‘feel good 
white person urbanism.’

HT: What do you mean by ‘white person urbanism’?  
MC: Gehl designs the same Copenhagen public 

spaces all over the world, with the same bicycle 
paths, sidewalk cafes, and pedestrianized streets. He 
never takes on the issues that are really at stake, such 
as rights, exclusion or street livelihoods. Instead, 
his designs deal with highly conventional notions 
of public space as simply pleasurable, satisfying a 
universal public. Along with organizations such as 
the Project for Public Space, who are also allegedly 
devoted to public space, he neglects the most 
serious issues of public space. They approach public 

    AFRICAN 
AMERICAN MEN, 

BUT ALSO WOMEN, 
HAVE NOT 

ACHIEVED THE 
RIGHT TO PUBLIC 

SPACE, EVEN 
THOUGH THE STATE 

GUARANTEES IT 
LEGALLY. 

“

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space from a highly generic professional perspective. Another professional 
approach might be architects working for a municipality. These designers 
face other difficulties, with competing demands from different groups of 
citizens. However, since the municipal architects are very familiar with the 
places and the publics where they work, they can potentially create new 

and distinctive public spaces in diverse circumstances. This depends on the 
designer avoiding already codified ideas and principles, and understanding 
the users and their concerns.  

My colleague at Berkeley, Walter Hood, who is a landscape architect, 
only starts designing parks after carefully observing the neighborhood, 
aiming to understand what is going on. For an assignment redesigning a 
park in Oakland, he observed that the existing park was used by older men, 
who stayed during the day and drank together. He decided not to edit that 
out in his park design. Architects, I would argue, necessarily need a similar 
attentiveness to existing use, to the publics that are already there. But at 
the same time, you also have to understand that these uses and publics 
change over time. Time is a very important dimension of space. Designers 
also need to be pay attention to circumstances. Their designs need to be 
conditional and circumstantial, and to leave room for occupation and 
improvisation. Most parks in the United States usually have an incredible 
list of the things you can’t do there, and drinking is usually at the top of 
it. Such lists question the very publicness of these spaces. Is this space 
really public? No! But ultimate publicness does not exist. There are always 
different kinds of exclusions and restrictions. Paradoxically, some private 

LaFayette Square Park, Oakland CA, Walter Hood, landscape architect (1999)



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spaces are more public than are formal public (in 
the sense of being owned by the state) spaces. But 
is this what we mean when we discuss public space? 
Should it be ‘state-owned’? Or does ‘public’ mean: 
accommodating groups of publics? I would argue 
that to pin the idea of public space down to particular 
circumstances is a slippery idea. A fixed definition 
would deny the various struggles over public space, 
the changing publics, and the assertion of different 
kinds of rights over the space. All these instances are 
related to the specificity of the location of a park or 
square, and what publics make use of it. Who owns 
the space, who can appropriate it, and who has a 
say? These are the questions to be understood and 
addressed. 

However, coming back to your question on 
what architecture can do, it is hard for designers 
to mediate between the claims of different publics. 
I would argue that they should not aim to please 
everybody. For me, that means acknowledging 
the issue of struggle. Public space is an incredibly 
complicated issue, since it is constantly changing 
and contested. My goal in teaching has been to 
sensitize architects to these challenges, to observe, 
to understand who is using these spaces, and what 
they are doing. Public spaces are meant for particular 
publics. Nevertheless, we cannot choreograph how 
and if this public adopts the space. That is up to the 
public itself. But one of the problems we have in 
the United States is that architecture is largely a very 
un-diverse profession. Walter Hood and many other 
designers are starting to rethink what public space 
design can be. Their projects, in the era of Black 
Lives Matter, are reshaping the design profession’s 
approach to designed public space. So public space 
has not ended at all! It is always renewing itself, and 
will continue to do so in the future.

Endnotes
1.  Margaret Crawford, ‘The World in a Shopping 

Mall’, in: Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations on a 



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Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space (New 
York: Hill and Wang, 1992).

2. Michael Sorkin, ‘Introduction’, in: Michael Sorkin (ed.), Variations 
on a Theme Park. The New American City and the End of Public Space 
(New York: Hill and Wang, 1992), XV.

3. Margaret Crawford, ‘Contesting the Public Realm: Struggles over 
Public Space in Los Angeles’, in: Journal of Architectural Education, 
Vol. 49, No. 1 (Sep., 1995), 4.

4. John Chase, Margeret Crawford, John Kaliski (eds.), Everyday 
Urbanism (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999).

5. A clear instance of the political dimension was shown in the Rodney 
King Riots in Los Angeles, which happened shortly after the 
publication of Variations of a Theme Park in 1992. Margaret Crawford, 
‘Blurring the Boundaries. Public Space and Private Life’, in: John 
Chase, Margeret Crawford, John Kaliski (eds.), Everyday Urbanism 
(New York: The Monacelli Press, 1999), 28.

6. See for instance Nancy Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A 
Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, in: 
Craig Calhoun (ed.), Habermas and the Public Sphere. (Cambridge 
Mass.: MIT Press, 1992).


