This is something that I’ve been thinking of a lot. How people are searching for a physical convergence of community but the spaces that they find for this are all mediated by capitalism.
NPR : ‘Lifestyle Centers’ Make Shopping Fashionable:
The fast-growing suburb of South Windsor, Conn., has a problem. It has lots of big highways and subdivisions, but no “town center.” So South Windsor is creating one by building a “lifestyle center,” a kind of latter-day shopping center that’s become very popular with architects and designers.