A placeless landscape I see often is Airport Road Shopping Center. This shopping center consists of stores like Target, Starbucks, Ulta, GameStop, Fine Wines & Good Spirits, etc. Stores you can find almost anywhere and have been there for a long time.
The Airport Road Shopping Center is a landscape that I can identify as “placeless,” because of the big stores that are at every shopping center, like Target, or GameStop. Yet I also can identify Airport Road because of its personal significance to me. Airport Road has always been a place I would either shop or pass every day because of its location. It was the closest shopping center to me for most of my life, and it also was on the way to my elementary through high school. Since I was always there or passing there, I could identify it based on how it physically looked, or the layout of the stores. Yet if you’d name all the stores there and then asked me what shopping center you're talking about, I wouldn’t know. This is what makes the Airport Road Shopping Center inevitably “placeless.”
For example, there are tons of shopping centers that have the same stores. A shopping center like this is Crest Plaza. Crest Plaza shopping center has the stores Target, GameStop, Fine Wine & Good Spirits, etc. It has very similar stores to the other shopping center. The little stores that they differ from don’t provide that much of a difference to make these two shopping centers distinct in any way.
Nowadays most shopping centers have these things, because it would be found inconvenient if they didn’t. If a shopping center didn’t have some sort of grocery store, or any popular stores that people like, then most people wouldn’t bother going. They wouldn’t have a reason to. The only reason I go to Crest Plaza now is because I live closer to it and it’s convenient to be able to get groceries or things I need there.
Globalization like this has its pros and cons. There are good things about globalization like letting everyone experience similar stores like TARGET, as well as making different places feel more connected, because of the familiarity with similar stores. Yet globalization can be a bad thing because of the lack of diversity and distinctness between different shopping centers and stores in general. It limits reasons to go to other countries if they have the same cultures and same stores we have here. Also, if we have places so indistinguishable, they lose all their culture, all their significance.
Yet placeless landscapes will continue to grow, as well as Targets and GameStops will continue to exist in many different shopping centers. It’s important to have these little placeless landscapes, but also definitely to keep enough culture and diversity to the stores we have around us. Maybe don’t always get the groceries at target, even though it’s convenient.
3 comments:
I definitely agree. Everywhere you go, the placeless landscapes all look the same and if you aren't familiar with a place, seeing the placeless landscape, like a shopping center, is no way for you to identify where you are since they are all the same. If it's a familiar place to you however, a placeless landscape can be very significant to you and your life.
I used to go to this same exact shopping center all the time as a kid. I feel like a lot of this region of Pennsylvania is becoming more and more placeless like this. While I have a lot of fond memories of this same shopping center as well, it is far from anything unique or special.
I find this post interesting as in this age there are countless examples of placeless landscapes such as this. Land is constantly being used for new shopping centers and industrial purposes. Even in the short time I have been in college I have already noticed changes in my hometown where industry has taken over.
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