My understanding from the history lessons of the book is that malls were intended to be “safe” replacement downtowns for white-flight suburban women, plunked down in empty fields in a vaguely cardinal direction from the nearby (and newly built) island of suburban homes—hence the “[direction] + [land type]” naming convention. The mall as a structure was isolated by what the book refers to as “moats” of highways and parking lots so that only those suburban car-havers could get there; protection from the dangerous elements of the city from which the suburbanites fled in the first place. Car supremacy & anti-black racism, the beating heart of mid-century America.

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