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Abstract

Chinese

This article engages and adds to the literature on social infrastructure (SI) and malls with an ethnographic account of an inner-city, large-scale mall in Beijing, China. While recent SI research has explored various public, commercial, recreational, religious, and digital spaces, malls remain largely overlooked in this evolving scholarship. Taking a sociability-focused, user-centered infrastructural approach and drawing on my fieldwork, I analyze how the mall actualizes its potential as SI across four registers of sociability, namely pleasurable co-presence of strangers, cross-difference encounters, social care, and personal relationship work. This article highlights the dynamic interplay among people, the social, and infrastructure by tracing the micro-level processes through which urban inhabitants navigate everyday life in the mall while simultaneously animating it as SI. I argue that excavating the potential of malls as SI provides an alternative perspective for understanding the relationship between consumption spaces and inclusive urban milieux.

Keywords

Chinese urbanism mall public space sociability social infrastructure

Introduction

The rise of malls is both a driving force and a manifestation of the spreading consumerism in urban China. Since the adoption of “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics” —a governance model combining market reforms with state control (Harvey, 2005: 120)—consumption has increasingly become a means to improve living standards, attain status, and negotiate identity (Gerth, 2020). Scholars have used a political-economic lens to frame malls as spatial-symbolic manifestations of consumerism (Wang, 2019). Although existing studies acknowledge that malls may diversify urban space when commenting on their architectural design and publicness (Gaubatz, 2008; Jewell, 2015; Wang and Chen, 2018), there remains insufficient knowledge about how malls constitute the social fabric of urban life. In response, this paper takes a social constructionist approach to examine mall users’ experiences of sociability, offering more nuanced insights into the role of malls in everyday life in Chinese cities.

This article is primarily concerned not with malls as mere sites of commerce and trade, but with illuminating them as everyday spaces of sociability. Critical urban scholarship has traditionally analyzed malls in terms of “the alienation of commodity consumption” and their ideological function for consumerist capitalism (Goss, 1993: 40; Németh, 2009; Sorkin, 1992; Staeheli and Mitchell, 2006). Challenging this one-directional understanding of malls as “bridgeheads of an all-conquering capitalism” (Miller et al., 1998: 24), subsequent researchers have emphasized the sociocultural meanings of mall life (Allen, 2006; Tyndall, 2010; Wang and Lo, 2007), complicated their roles in the everyday politics of difference (Miller and Laketa, 2019; Parlette and Cowen, 2011), and reaffirmed their significance beyond the purely commercial scope (Jayne, 2006; Miller, 2014; Miller and Laketa, 2019). However, current mall literature may not adequately engage with the enactments of sociability—the experience of interaction that concretizes the human tendency to seek social connections and enjoy companionship.¹ In earlier research on malls, sociability, particularly forms not directly driven or only loosely mediated by consumption, is dismissed as the “magic” of capitalist manipulation (Goss, 1993). Later studies shed light on mall sociability but tend to focus on its conditions or outcomes in relation to ethnic identity (Wang and Lo, 2007), urban publicness (Tyndall, 2010), affective experiences and power (Allen, 2006; Thrift, 2004), and the politics of difference (Miller and Laketa, 2019), leaving the forms, processes, and dynamics of mall sociability largely underexplored.

Drawing on recent infrastructural thinking—particularly the conceptualization of social infrastructure (SI) as physical urban (semi-)public spaces that facilitate interactions and connections (Klinenberg, 2018; Latham and Layton, 2019), the notion of people as infrastructure (Simone, 2004), the view of infrastructure as a process (Graham and Thrift, 2007), and the oft-ignored transformative role of users of urban spaces (Larsen, 2024; Latham and Wood, 2015)—I foreground a sociability-focused, user-centered infrastructural approach to mall life. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a large-scale inner-city mall in Beijing, I make a case for understanding the mall as SI by analyzing multiple registers of sociability—the traces left by the continuously unfolding sociable interactions. Although sociability does not cover all dimensions of SI (Enneking et al., 2025), it is a focal point for examining the social functions of SI with sensitivity to mundane interactions among everyday users of urban space. I argue that it is through everyday users’ practices of sociability that the mall actualizes its potential as SI.

Directing attention to the mall’s role as SI by focusing on sociability, this article complements recent mall research and further foregrounds malls’ sociocultural significance. It also contributes to the evolving SI literature by highlighting the relationship among people, the social, and infrastructure. More importantly, given that recent SI literature has focused almost exclusively on the Global North (Enneking et al., 2025), this article attends to this asymmetry by contributing empirical data from China to international debates on SI. Rather than serving only as a case study in a Chinese register, the insights generated through the sociability-focused, user-centered infrastructural approach to mall life may inform researchers worldwide about the complexities and dynamic processes of SI, attuned more closely to the lived experiences of ordinary people and the cities they inhabit.

A sociability-focused and user-centered infrastructural approach to mall life

When thinking about cities, it is usually in terms of concentrations of populations, centers of inequality, and amalgamations of political-economic events and social-cultural dynamics. While cities are all these and more, their functioning relies on complex but mostly unseen infrastructures (Graham and Marvin, 2001). The recent “infrastructural turn” has brought these background systems (Amin, 2014: 138), which were once noticed only in moments of malfunction or insufficiency (Star, 1999), to the forefront of urban studies. Researchers have examined issues such as the link between the provision of staples of life and splintering landscapes along with struggles for recognition (Amin, 2014; Graham and Marvin, 2001), migrant-owned businesses (Jung and Buhr, 2022), the governance of infrastructure (Whiteside, 2019), and the relationship between transport infrastructure and their commuters (Latham and Wood, 2015), among others. This infrastructural thinking examines the complex connectedness between different sociotechnical systems and spaces, modalities of sociality and identity, and urban well-being and sustainability (Graham and Marvin, 2001).

Everyday social life also needs infrastructure. The concept of SI offers a new language to unpack how public spaces and organizations function as sites of social capital and conviviality (van Melik and Merry, 2023), service providers (DeVerteuil et al., 2022), platforms for collective action (Stender and Nordberg, 2022), pandemic responses (Glover, 2021), and sentiments of belonging (see Enneking et al., 2025 for a review). The research terrain of SI, according to Latham and Layton (2022), revolves around four interconnected themes: people’s informal practices and relationships in the absence of infrastructure provisioning, power and politics surrounding the functioning of physical infrastructure, infrastructure of social care, and spaces that promote interpersonal connections. Particularly noteworthy is the last dimension, which is indebted to Klinenberg’s (2018) study on the disparities in mortality rates during the 1995 Chicago heat wave and further popularized by Latham and Layton’s (2019: 9) normative argument for “spaces where people can socialise and connect with others.” Despite attempts to localize SI in digital and non-urban contexts (Högström et al., 2022), this body of research understands SI as physical urban spaces that enable gatherings, facilitate community life, and support shared sociocultural experiences (Layton and Latham, 2022), focusing on the relationship between urban spaces and “the way people interact with each other in everyday life” (Klinenberg, 2018: 5). In line with this, I use SI to refer to physical (semi-)public spaces of sociable interactions and connections in cities.

Understanding SI in relation to sociable interactions and connections offers several analytical advantages. It allows us to comprehensively examine different forms and processes of sociability as a central and foremost concern (Latham and Layton, 2022), broadening traditional interactionist studies that tend to focus on either the dynamics amongst strangers or on the social capital within acquaintanceship (Layton and Latham, 2022). Furthermore, it conceptualizes SI as operating between people and things in specific environments, thus crafting a contextually sensitive way to examine how interactions are shaping and are shaped by particular time/spaces (Campbell et al., 2022; Glover, 2021; Klinenberg, 2018). Additionally, it blurs the rigidly conceived public–private boundary, shedding light on both publicly owned public spaces (Larsen, 2024; van Melik and Merry, 2023) and spaces that are privately owned but have a public character (Grundström, 2022; Jung and Buhr, 2022).

Malls can be understood as SI, yet they receive little attention in recent SI literature (Enneking et al., 2025; Högström et al., 2022; Latham and Layton, 2022).² This gap is related to the earlier critiques that portray malls as “cathedrals of consumption” (Crewe and Gregson, 1998: 40) and spaces for consumption in which “consumers engage less with each other and more with the space itself” (Miles, 2010: 177). These critiques are intertwined with broader narratives of the decline of public space (Sorkin, 1992), focusing on privatization and concomitant surveillance, controls, and exclusion (Németh, 2009; Staeheli and Mitchell, 2006). Although acknowledging malls may function as spaces of urban social life, these earlier neo-Marxist critiques downgrade mall sociability to the “magic” of consumerist ideology (Goss, 1993).

Later generations of mall research have challenged this totalizing understanding of mall life. Interpretive mall research conducted globally, from Toronto (Parlette and Cowen, 2011; Wang and Lo, 2007) to Johannesburg (Aceska and Heer, 2019), from Santiago (Stillerman and Salcedo, 2012) to Sydney (Tyndall, 2010), provides evidence that shopping is practiced with sociocultural meanings (Miller et al., 1998). Echoing Fincher et al.’s (2019: 7) formulation of “being together in difference as equals,” these works also reveal the potential of malls as sites of heterogeneity, where different groups come together and social relationships are (re)constituted “through various practices of shopping and identity” (Miller et al., 1998: 26). Drawing particularly on non-representational thinking, scholars examine how the unmarked power of consumerist capitalism is experienced in malls (Allen, 2006; Miller, 2014; Miller and Laketa, 2019; Rose et al., 2010; Thrift, 2004). Consumerist capitalism exerts its power not only through overt surveillance techniques but also through the affective mall space curated by seductive spatial arrangements (Allen, 2006; Thrift, 2004). Despite the presence of this power, the literature also engages with what Goss (1993) termed “magic,” viewing it as more than an ideological illusion—as a convergence of forces that produce political, social, and cultural identities and relationships (Miller and Laketa, 2019).

While complicating our understanding of the multiple modalities of urban life juxtaposed and interwoven with the power of consumerism, current research may not fully engage with how sociability unfolds in malls. Rather than being explored as a central theme, sociability is often mentioned in passing or embedded in other topics, such as urban publicness (Tyndall, 2010), ethnic affinity (Wang and Lo, 2007), the engineering of affect (Thrift, 2004), and ambient power (Allen, 2006). An implicit thread running through the literature, however, is that people’s engagements with malls are not all mediated by consumer identities or acts of purchasing (Stillerman and Salcedo, 2012); mundane interactions can take place with relative independence, rather than “through the process of consumption” (Tyndall, 2010: 130). Resonating with Amin’s (2008: 7) argument that it is not only “through” but also “beyond” consumption practices that “the experience of public space remains one of sociability,” my close reading reveals the need to examine mall sociability as a key area of analysis. Examining mall life “beyond” consumption neither sets up a strict opposition between consumption and sociability nor overlooks the manipulative or seductive powers of malls. Rather, it seeks to capture the richness of mall sociability, particularly its forms and processes that are not directly oriented toward or are only loosely mediated by consumption.

To bridge these gaps, this article examines the potential of the mall as SI by focusing on sociability from the perspective of everyday mall users. Two interconnected understandings of infrastructure are fundamentally relevant here. The first is the notion of people as infrastructure. Simone (2004: 407) notes that infrastructure cannot be understood in exclusively physical terms, calling for reframing infrastructure around people’s labors, practices, and “constitutive capabilities that respond to and re-align their immediate everyday circumstances” (Wilson and Jonas, 2021: 1333). This shifts our focus from engineered systems to people, prioritizing “explorations of how urban inhabitants render life possible” (Addie, 2021: 1353). The second claim frames infrastructure as an ongoing process rather than a fixed assemblage, complicating its ontology by emphasizing its perpetual “state of becoming” (Adey, 2006: 80). Continuous efforts in repair and maintenance, coupled with the informal cooperation that sustains urban life in the absence of formal infrastructural provisions, direct our attention from infrastructure to infrastructuring actors and acts (Graham and Thrift, 2007).

Refuting “the myth of infrastructure as fixed and stable emplacement” (Graham and Thrift, 2007: 10), these two claims challenge the technical determinism that assumes infrastructures simply function once installed (Kuoppa and Kymäläinen, 2022). In this light, SIs are not seen as self-enclosed entities but as dynamic spaces whose capacities for interactions and sociability are continuously actualized through different actors’ flux of practices. Researchers examine the roles, responsibilities, and labor of a wide range of stakeholders in providing and sustaining SIs, including policymakers, planners, community service providers, designers, architects, civil stewardship groups, and housing associations (Campbell et al., 2022; DeVerteuil et al., 2022; Grundström, 2022; Högström et al., 2022). Attention has also been given to those whose work is under-recognized, such as street-level workers (Kuoppa and Kymäläinen, 2022), and caregivers of people with disabilities (Carnemolla, 2022).

Scholars also call for closer attention to how SI is (re)worked by urban users (Latham and Wood, 2015). Rather than “submissive audience[s]” of urban landscapes (Degen et al., 2008: 1908), they actively animate, activate, and domesticate urban spaces and transform these spaces into SIs (Larsen, 2024). This emphasis on the actual (un)becoming of SI from the users’ perspective is implicitly present in studies across various urban settings, including shared housing (Grundström, 2022), neighborhood facilities (Stender and Nordberg, 2022), and the sidewalks during the pandemic (Glover, 2021). Acknowledging everyday users’ experiences is particularly important for exploring the potential of malls as SI because malls are “always open to reversals, destabilisations, and inversions of the intended model of behaviour and experience” (Degen et al., 2008: 1908).

Informed by the above, this article adopts a sociability-focused, user-centered infrastructural approach to capture how the mall’s potential as SI is actualized in everyday life. This approach underscores one oft-overlooked aspect of the relationship between the social and infrastructure: sociability is not just what SI does—affords or facilitates—for people but also what people do to make SI sociable. Below, I present data on the registers of sociability identified in my research. Before that, however, I outline the research site and methods.

Research site and methods

As “the heart of China’s socialist market economy” (Jewell, 2015: 8), Beijing has witnessed a mall boom over the past three decades. In the context of “state-led consumerism” (Gerth, 2020: 79), the central government recently designated Beijing as a pilot for building international consumption center cities (The People’s Government of Beijing Municipality, 2024). As capital-driven spaces, malls continuously reshape the urban consumption landscape. Yet as pseudo-public spaces where people meet and gather (Wang, 2019), malls also reconfigure the everyday social fabric and influence how public space is experienced by ordinary inhabitants in Beijing—even amid the presence of consumerist power (Gaubatz, 2008). In this light, Beijing occupies a center stage in understanding everyday Chinese mall life.

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Taikoo Li Mall in Sanlitun (see Figure 1). As a populous subdistrict of Chaoyang district located about 3 km northeast of the city center, Sanlitun is a miniature of the political-economic and socio-cultural evolution of Beijing’s landscapes. It has evolved from a collective housing area for state-owned enterprises in the 1950s to one of the city’s embassy zones in the 1960s, a hub of street commerce in the 1990s, and a center for recreation and consumption that still retains traces of its past functions today. Opening in 2008, Taikoo Li is the defining mall in the subdistrict. It offers a wide range of shops and services, including over 200 boutiques, dining venues, bookstores, beauty salons, gyms, galleries, pop-up flea markets, a supermarket, and a Cineplex. Taikoo Li features both high-tier and budget-friendly brands, appealing to shoppers with different purchasing capacities.

Figure 1.

Upper row (left to right): Sanlitun’s location in Beijing, Taikoo Li’s location in Sanlitun, and the spatial layout of Taikoo Li. Lower row (left to right): the main courtyard, sunken garden, and deck-like square in Taikoo Li.

Some spatial particularities of the mall also deserve to be mentioned here. First, the mall’s internal spatial diversity generates a plethora of opportunities for urban inhabitants to engage with the mall spaces in different ways. As of 2021, Taikoo Li comprises over 20 detached low-rise buildings with varying heights and irregular forms, interconnected by gardens, courtyards, and alleys. These buildings are scattered in two adjacent but non-bordered blocks (the southern and northern areas), which are linked by a 250 m car-free street. Abundant publicly accessible outdoor spaces allow visitors to use them for different purposes. Second, in contrast to the classic American malls that are often built in the middle of “nowhere” in the suburbs (Jewell, 2015: 18), the mall is physically close to surrounding residential neighborhoods. This proximity makes it possible for nearby residents to use mall spaces as extended parts of their residential compounds. Third, its accessibility via numerous public transport routes makes it possible for visitors from across Beijing to visit the mall with ease. Fourth, neighboring one of Beijing’s embassy districts, the mall caters to urban inhabitants from different cultural backgrounds.

I conducted four months of ethnographic fieldwork in the mall from August to December 2021. Initially, I engaged with the heterogeneous spaces by mindful walking (Jung, 2014), and I employed walk-by observation to discern “social hubs” with particularly vibrant social life in the mall (Mehta, 2019). Informed by this, I did about 60 days (around 120 hours) of participant observation at particular “hubs” —such as the main courtyard, the sunken garden, the deck-like square, and outdoor benches—to capture setting features, visually identifiable demographic information about users, and interactions I both witnessed and participated in. Observation notes were taken on a smartphone during the on-site interactions I observed and were organized immediately after each session. I also conducted 65 semi-structured interviews with Chinese mall visitors of different age (mean 30), gender (54% women, 40% men, 6% non-binary), occupation (e.g. employees of state-owned and private enterprises, college faculty and students, public servants, and freelancers), place of residence (29% in Chaoyang district, 52% in other districts in Beijing, 19% outside Beijing), and self-reported monthly income (median 8000 yuan),³ recruited through accidental, targeted, and snowball samplings. Sixteen interviews were conducted in the walk-along format (Kusenbach, 2003), and the rest were completed in person or online based on participants’ preferences. Interviews lasted between 20 and 95 minutes and were conducted in Mandarin, audio-recorded, and transcribed verbatim.

Data was analyzed thematically after fieldwork. First, transcriptions and fieldnotes were closely read and categorized into descriptive codes (e.g. “the sunken garden as a social hub”) largely anchored by activities, actors, or settings. Then, these initial codes served as a loose guide for re-reading the data, while I also identified shared patterns in/across them to refine key themes (e.g. “cross-difference encounters”). Finally, I juxtaposed these themes to develop sensitizing concepts (e.g. “registers of sociability”) and built dialogs with existing literature as I prepared for writing (Blumer, 1986). I report the four registers of sociability identified across the observation and interview data in the next section. Quotations were selected based on their analytical relevance to ensure they exemplified common patterns in the data.⁴

Registers of sociability in the mall as social infrastructure

Pleasurable co-presence of strangers

The pleasurable co-presence of strangers is widely regarded as a fundamental feature of SI (Klinenberg, 2018; Rokem and Vaughan, 2019). Although it is not a guarantor of inclusion (Valentine, 2008), co-presence may nurture a sense of mutual recognition and create opportunities to learn to be together with others (Fincher et al., 2019; Fincher and Iveson, 2017). The co-presence of strangers in the mall is generally perceived as an enjoyable experience. Many participants reported they often delightfully seek the companionship of strangers without a need for further interactional involvement. Some participants even invoked yanhuoqi (烟火气, the wood-burnt aroma of cooking), a local concept that embodies the vibrancy transpiring in the socio-spatial practices of places and giving people a sense of being alive, to underscore the pleasure of being in crowds:

The main thing about visiting the mall is to absorb yanhuoqi, … many people are vibrantly thriving like plants. I feel I am an individual when I shut myself up in my residence. When I enter the mall and see the mass of people walking and talking around me, I feel surrounded by an atmosphere of positivity that is yanhuoqi … (Interview, September 27, 2021)

The ritual of civil inattention underpins the functioning of the mall as SI by turning the public geography of mall life into routinized civility (Goffman, 1963). As children frolicked in the splash fountain in front of the Apple flagship store, their guardians scattered around the fountain. Although verbal communication sometimes took place among these guardians as strangers, in most cases, they engaged in people-watching to observe the behaviors of others in a non-intrusive manner:

I watched people busily going to work and people waiting for friends to come on a date … I watched arguments, hugs, marriage proposals, and street photography. I would not take the initiative to get to know these strangers directly, … but watching them was fun. (Interview, September 1, 2021)

Although co-presence is a kind of passive sociability (Mehta, 2019), it is meaningful for many mall visitors. Some participants treated it as a chance to observe urban life outside their private realms, commenting that the mall is “like a window through which one can read about society and people” (Interview, September 27, 2021). This feeling of “reading” can be stimulated by the theater-like spatial layout of the mall’s main courtyard. As one participant described, “When I entered the mall, I felt like standing at the entrance of a theater and a great show was about to begin” (Interview, September 7, 2021). Other participants tried to fulfill their curiosities about “how people’s behaviors are guided by space” by strolling in the mall and observing which areas are the most crowded (Interview, November 18, 2021). Even the most mundane forms of engaging with SI can enable individuals to “develop time- and place-specific understandings of the world” and “perceptions of the city they inhabit” (Angelo and Hentschel, 2015: 306).

The mall’s potential as SI is unlocked by people “being out amongst other people” (Latham and Layton, 2019: 4). Everyday mall users create a shared world of co-presence and link their experiences “with larger imaginations of the city” (Aceska and Heer, 2019: 58). Not all public spaces in Chinese cities can sustain such pleasurable co-presence, as many grandiose projects are designed more to showcase administrative achievements to upper-level officials than to accommodate urban inhabitants’ uses (Miao, 2011); some commercial complexes, however, have become spaces where people spend time in the proximity of strangers recently (Wang and Chen, 2018). The analysis above adds ethnographic evidence to emphasize that being co-present with strangers in the mall is socially pleasurable and, for many visitors, meaningful in itself.

Cross-difference encounters

Aligning with Fincher et al.’s (2019: 9) theorization of “encounters with difference as a centerpiece of urban ontology,” scholars often emphasize encounters across differences in their works on SI (Kuoppa and Kymäläinen, 2022; Yarker, 2021). Because of its proximity to the embassy district, Taikoo Li is always used by visitors from different ethnic–cultural backgrounds. Mall spaces are used as bridging sites of contact where people come together through “rubbing along” to learn to engage with others through encounters (Watson, 2009: 1581). Located beneath an extensive eave of a nearby building, the 50 m-long staircase on the west side of the main courtyard functions as a well-frequented area where mall visitors can be shielded from the sun and find seats. The following excerpt demonstrates a moment of the often-observed intercultural sociability on this staircase:

A middle-aged White woman and a young Chinese man in his early 20s sat near each other. The man started to sneeze uncontrollably, so he pulled a new shirt from his shopping bag to shield his mouth. The woman said, ‘Bless you’ to the man; he shrugged his shoulders and replied in Chinese: ‘I do not understand what you said, but I am sorry about that.’ The woman did not seem to understand either, but both laughed loudly. (Fieldnotes, September 6, 2021)

Encounters across class-based differences can take place in malls (Stillerman and Salcedo, 2012), and this is evident in Taikoo Li as well. A typical example is the scene that I call informal “childcare workshops” at the mall’s sunken garden, a spacious outdoor space surrounded by stylish boutiques and equipped with benches, flower terraces, art installations, and a pond. Every weekday afternoon, children from nearby elementary schools and their guardians—parents (local residents) and hired caregivers (domestic migrant workers)—gather here. In a casual chat, a babysitter who often joined this “workshop” revealed that, unlike the mostly local middle-class parents—especially those from the only-child generation—migrant caregivers had more childcare experience and were always generous in sharing their knowledge with less experienced parents (Fieldnotes, November 11, 2021). This imbalance disrupted the class differentiation between these two groups and produced opportunities for cross-class sociability.

Age is another salient form of social difference mediating everyday interactions in the mall. In contrast to the view that older mall visitors tend to maintain networks of personal relationships with others of the same age because of their diminished social status (Lewis, 1990), different age groups can socialize with each other in a “non-orchestrated” way in Taikoo Li (Yarker, 2021: 269). Due to the ample outdoor spaces and its proximity to the surrounding residential compounds, nearby residents use mall spaces as places to walk dogs. Considering the importance of pets as potential facilitators of sociability in public settings (Robins et al., 1991), it is not surprising to regularly observe pet-facilitated intergenerational interactions amongst strangers:

An older woman (about 80) with a brown puppy entered the mall from the main entrance and walked toward the bench where a young woman (about 20) was eating her ice cream. Seeing the puppy circling her feet with her tail sticking up high, the girl asked if she could share her ice cream with the little cutie. The older woman turned to the puppy and said: ‘Greedy you, say thank you to your sister!’ This girl bent down and put the cone in a suitable position for the puppy to lick. (Fieldnotes, September 15, 2021)

The mall is saturated with interactions amongst people “whose bodies are different, whose styles are different, who make different sounds, speak different languages” (Klinenberg, 2018: 46). While these interactions are typically fleeting, they “hold potential for more profound social relations” (Yarker, 2021: 266). Current research on the interactional landscape of Beijing’s public spaces tends to focus on particular social groups or age-bounded collective activities (Chen, 2010; Richaud, 2018). The analysis here extends this body of research by illustrating how the mall can be used as SI to promote sociability across lines of race, class, and age.

Social care

SI has a dimension of care (Carnemolla, 2022; Layton and Latham, 2022), and mall life involves interpersonal acts of caring and kindness (Rose et al., 2010). My fieldwork frequently captured altruistic acts, such as helping children who fall, taking pictures for strangers, and giving directions to lost people. I now, however, focus on elderly mall visitors, not only because they are primary recipients of care but also because they have developed “informal networks of care” through their regular gatherings at the mall (Yarker, 2021: 266). With its thoughtfully designed looped pedestrian route, the deck-like square attracted many seniors to walk its perimeter as their daily routine exercise. A small group of males aged 60–70 often gathered on the lawn south of the Kenzo boutique after their walking on weekday evenings. They interestingly addressed each other by their sneaker brands, such as “Sketchers Guy,” “Shortie Peak,” and “Jordan Dude.” When one member, who seemed suffering from chronic disease, missed their walking routine for days, the others showed care for him:

The man with a mustache asked, ‘Why don’t you go and greet him?’ The older man wearing a red hat responded, ‘I don’t know where he lives and do not have his contact information.’ Another elderly man standing next to them joined the conversation: ‘If I am correct, he worked in our jiedaoban (街道办, subdistrict office) before his retirement. I would probably go there tomorrow and ask to see if we can contact him.’ (Fieldnotes, October 26, 2021)

Rose et al. (2010) observe that care in malls mostly occurs within acquaintanceships, whereas my data show elderly visitors often receive care from unknown younger generations. Senior residents of a government-built but privately operated nursing home located between the southern and northern zones of the mall tended to claim outdoor spaces of the mall as their backyards by occupying benches. When the mall saw a surge in visitors in the evenings, benches became scarce. Yet, in most cases when the elderly needed a seat, younger mall visitors would offer theirs to them.

A gray-haired lady with a cane slowly approached the circular bench in the courtyard. A middle-aged man offered his seat to the old woman, and she gladly accepted and thanked him verbally. The seat was wet, as the man had previously placed his iced drink there, so he borrowed a piece of tissue from another woman beside him and wiped the chair clean for the old woman. (Fieldnotes, September 3, 2021)

The second group of mall users involved in acts of care I observed are participants in the unsanctioned economy. Although vendors are commonly found in malls (Stillerman and Salcedo, 2012), the diverse range of participants in the informal economy in Taikoo Li is particularly palpable. Taking advantage of the high accessibility of the mall as an unfenced open space, some domestic migrants engage in unofficial commercial activities to sell flowers, parasols, beauty and cleaning products, and sometimes even pet dogs. Many of them are self-employed, economically disadvantaged, and/or physically disabled, and I observed that security guards often showed tolerance toward these vendors. More importantly, caring acts occasionally occurred between vendors and their customers:

The young woman squatted down and asked, ‘Auntie, it is so late. Where do you live? How will you go home?’ The woman selling flowers responded: ‘My place is not far from here. I want to sell here for a little longer, then take the bus back.’ The woman continued: ‘I’ll buy all your flowers, and you just go back early.’ The girl bought the remaining ten roses for 100 yuan. (Fieldnotes, September 3, 2021)

The commercial functions of the mall recede, and sociable mall spaces also become caring ones (Rose et al., 2010). Examples presented above provide ethnographic footnotes to Fincher et al.’s (2019: 50) argument that care is an “element for enacting being together in difference as equals” in urban spaces. In Beijing, researchers have examined the interstitial neighborhood spaces in hutongs (Rock, 2018) and parks (Richaud, 2018) as spaces of care amongst mutually acquainted groups. My analysis complicates Beijing’s changing geographies of care under neoliberalism, showing that care is practiced pervasively among a wide range of mall users, even when they are strangers.

Personal relationship work

Well-functioning SI is not only made possible by interactions amongst strangers but also by the practice of existing relationships (Glover, 2021; Larsen, 2024). Resonating Layton and Latham’s (2022) observation of the urban park as a focal point for family events, Taikoo Li is actively used by family-oriented visitors to enhance familial relationships. Given that the mall offers “different objects that kids may not be familiar with, including lights, stores, amusement facilities, art installations” (Interview, September 5, 2021), some parents valued the benefits of the richness of spatial experiences in cognitive development for their children. Other participants emphasized that “children can be in contact with other children with different personalities, making new friends and finding their own social spaces in the mall” (Interview, August 23, 2021). They also stressed that regular mall visits can strengthen their spousal relationship:

When my son was playing around, my husband and I also had a precious opportunity to communicate our innermost thoughts. During the week, my husband and I are busy because we both have stressful jobs. This process promotes the parent–child relationship and the relationship between my husband and me. (Interview, September 3, 2021)

Moreover, the mall is used as a space of friendship. Despite the rise of digital networking, urban material spaces “continue to constitute the key technologies of friendship” (Bunnell et al., 2012: 491) Almost all participants reported that they used the mall as a gathering venue to meet friends. This is not only because shopping together “could increase the fine-grained mutual understanding amongst friends” (Interview October 15, 2021) but also because “the mall’s environment with high information density,” such as various “public art installations, landscaping, fountains, and people of different kinds,” afforded multiple “talking points to facilitate people’s communication” (Interview, October 4, 2021). Participants even cherished their shared mall experience as “a tacit affirmation, if not a milestone, of friendships” (Interview, October 19, 2021). One participant shared an interesting experience of using mall spaces as a platform to strengthen friendships among her maternal cohort:

After giving birth to my baby, I joined the online chat group for women who had antenatal examinations and parturition at the same obstetric hospital during the same period. This online chat group was established with the help of healthcare professionals working at that hospital. Although the mothers in this group are now scattered in various parts of the city, we regularly hold in-person gatherings to share the joys of becoming a mom in the mall. (Interview September 5, 2021)

Additionally, even instrumentally oriented collegial relationships can become more expressive in the mall. Given its proximity to Beijing’s central business district, the mall’s cafes and restaurants are often used as ad hoc workplaces where people can brainstorm or meet with clients. Shifting the work scenario temporarily from regular offices to the mall sometimes opens up the possibility of cultivating relatively equal relationships amongst colleagues, as one participant commented:

We would chat about many topics, such as private stock holdings and our kids, and even complain about the company together. These are things that are difficult to achieve in the formal working environment. These complaints about the company and getting to know each other beyond job duties have enhanced our relationship. (Interview, September 21, 2021)

The mall becomes a vibrant SI through the personal relationship work of its everyday users. My analysis echoes the relational approach to consumption—meanings and practices around consumer goods/spaces are crucial in creating social relationships (Miller et al., 1998)–but it also highlights that personal relationship work in the mall is not exclusively contingent upon acts of shopping or consumer identity construction. In Beijing, increasingly diverse leisure spaces serve as settings for urban residents to engage in personal relationship work (Chen, 2010; Jin and Whitson, 2014; Richaud, 2018). The analysis of Taikoo Li enriches this stream of research by showing the actualization of its potential to accommodate a wide range of personal relationship work as SI.

Conclusion

This article explores how the mall actualizes its potential as SI across four registers of sociability identified in Taikoo Li in Beijing. Although analytically distinct, these registers of sociability may overlap and blur the collective–individual boundary in the everyday experience of mall life. Sociability matters not only in terms of what the mall provides to its everyday users but also in how everyday users actively animate the mall into a form of SI beyond its default setting as merely a space for consumption. This reframing neither negates the manipulative power of mall spaces, nor presents consumption and non-consumption mall uses as absolutely opposed, nor attempts to reduce the social functions of SI to sociability.

The everyday life of SI is contextually situated in the specificities of urban spaces (Layton and Latham, 2022). The four registers of sociability are conditioned by the mall’s material and spatial particularities, such as advantageous location, abundant outdoor accessibility spaces, and well-maintained facilities, as well as the diverse mall users it attracts. However, emphasizing the contextual particularities of the mall is not contradictory to understanding malls generally as SI. The brief relational comparisons embedded in my data analysis suggest that similar registers of sociability can also be identifiable in other spaces in Beijing or other cities. It is precisely these similarities that testify to the mall’s role as SI, as they indicate how the registers of sociability traced in the mall respond to the common aspects of urban inhabitants’ social tendencies and needs that transcend the boundaries of different urban contexts. The extent to which the four registers of sociability can be applied to other malls and other (semi-)public spaces needs to be further explored with a comparative approach to engage with “an infrastructure of multiple spaces and how they relate to each other” (Enneking et al., 2025: 10).

Excavating the mall’s potential as SI is not about romanticizing mall life as a celebrated exemplar of urban sociability or as a panacea for urban exclusion. As Fincher et al. (2019: 50) reminds us, urban encounters “may also involve agitation and its associated conflict.” Although no overt conflicts among mall users were captured in my fieldwork, I observed mild confrontations between mall users and mall authorities (e.g. the cooperative and performative regulation between informal vendors and security guards). Moreover, while SI is “by definition a public and social good” (Layton and Latham, 2022: 659), the social interaction enacted in it can be entangled with inequality. The spontaneous mall activities readily accessible to residents of gentrified neighborhoods are not as equally available to those from peripheral urban areas, which implies that the actualization of SI may also mirror and reproduce broader structural inequality.

With all these considerations, this study contributes to the literature in three ways. First, it adds to the SI literature by proposing a user-centered, sociability-focused approach, highlighting the relationship among people, the social, and infrastructure. In my analysis, SI is not an entity but a process of continuously becoming (Graham and Thrift, 2007); mall users are not passive recipients but actors who aminate and retool the mall as SI (Degen et al., 2008: 1908). While the potential of SI is underpinned partly by works of planning, designing, engineering, and managing, its actualization is largely made possible through the everyday experience of sociability amongst its users (Larsen, 2024). Second, by introducing SI as an alternative perspective to examine emerging modalities of urban social life in malls, this article complements the recent turn to the emotional/affective dimensions of mall spaces (Allen, 2006; Miller, 2014; Miller and Laketa, 2019; Rose et al., 2010). Although sociability is not an entirely new analytical focus, exploring its richness through the lens of SI directly engages with the relationship between consumption spaces and the social fabrics of cities, reaffirming the relevance of malls for urban studies.

Lastly, this article demonstrates that SI offers a promising theoretical-conceptual lens for making sense of the continued rise of malls in the Global South, and that these emerging malls, in turn, provide concrete empirical-analytical sites for deepening our understanding of SI. While some places in North America face “the spectre of dead malls,” malls continue to proliferate in many cities in the Global South (Miller and Laketa, 2019: 911). Through the lens of SI, this article traces the micro-level processes in which urban inhabitants navigate everyday life in a mall and circumvent the dominant consumerist order from within (Jayne, 2006). It also enriches our understanding of the everyday actualization of urban spaces as SI with a greater sense of sociability, diversity, and equality in Southern cities. Loved or loathed, malls will stay and continue to shape our urban experience, not just as spaces for consumption but also as a form of SI.

Footnotes

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. Some ideas of an earlier version of this paper were presented at XX ISA World Congress of Sociology in Melbourne (26 June 2023). I sincerely thank the conference attendees,especially Franz Buhr,for their feedback and encouragement.

ORCID iD

Meng Xu

Ethical considerations

This research was approved by the Research Ethics Board at the University of Guelph in August 2021 (21-04-020).

Consent to participate

Appropriate individual informed consent was obtained verbally or on paper before participation in the research.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article: The completion of this paper was supported by Research Assistantship as part of a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Insight Grant (435-2018-0730).

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,authorship,and/or publication of this article.

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