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Enunciating Locality in the Postmodern Suburb: FlatIron Crossing and the Colorado Lifestyle

The shopping center is a major part of consumer space built in the U.S., and the shifts in shopping center design are part of the changing landscape of American consumer culture. In this essay we examine FlatIron Crossing, a mall and lifestyle center recently built in Colorado, to explore the development of the hybrid space as a response to postmodern suburbanization. We argue that FlatIron Crossing is a place making technology that offers invocations of locality as a response to the abstractions and placelessness of postmodern suburbanization. Locality, we argue, is different from “local” in that locality offers images of place rooted in time and geography but drawn from globalized images. Even as recent shopping centers and lifestyle centers offer images of place they do so to cover, without directly addressing, the difficult relation between the global and the local.