By the 1960s and 1970s, department stores were supplanted by value-oriented warehouses. Now, reflecting an urge for authenticity, malls mimic a real city without the attendant inconveniences Photo: Chris Hildreth

ordstrom makes me think of Nostradamus. Did the sixteenth-century astrologer prognosticate a consumer-service revolution? And sampling a store named Impostors makes me--well, a little uneasy about my identity. Am I only as authentic as the purchases I make?

There's authentic--a tricky word, it turns out--big news in Durham. Really, really big. It calls itself The Streets at Southpoint, a mega-mall with 1.3 million square feet providing a "shopping, dining, and entertainment destination," an "attraction of monumental proportions," as a press release puts it.

Something so big requires big thinking to absorb. So I gather my M-team, professors who would revel in or at least put up with maneuvering around a mall: Annabel Wharton of art and art history, James Rolleston of Germanic languages and literature, Lynn Maguire of the Nicholas School of the Environment, and James Bettman of the Fuqua School of Business. Cultural experts all. And, of course, confirmed shoppers.

For this merging at the mall, I park next to Organized Living, wondering if the store's "Make Life Simple" message is a lure or a dictate. And I find myself walking along a faux Main Street, so identified by a faux street sign. One of its central attractions is a large "interactive fountain"; as I dutifully "raise and lower hand over sensor to control fountain," I don't find the stream of water especially responsive, but I enjoy the spurts of aquatic energy just the same.

Rolleston, on the sculpture: "They're shaped children, quasi-diverse children, racially kind of in the middle Photo: Chris Hildreth

A kiosk sign advises, "Always unexpected. Be on the lookout for the Southpoint Street Performers." A second kiosk promises "an atmosphere reminiscent of a bustling city street. The energy is vibrant, the spirit is familiar, and everything is unique down to the feeling you walk away with." Can the familiar be unexpected and unique? Maybe not, but we do find something thoroughly unexpected and unique--rock music. This is authentic rock music--"Don't Know Much About History" and "Rock This Town"--pouring out of speakers embedded in Main Street's fake rocks.

Wharton, an expert on modern architecture and theory, mentions the "tortuous" aspects of travel. "I was sitting out in our own Raleigh-Durham airport and I noticed how there's no visual resistance anywhere. Everything is plastic, neutral in color, flat, rectilinear. There's nothing to look at. Putting in fountains and trees and such is a way of providing some visual resistance, something interesting in the environment that allows you to know where you are."

Rolleston enjoys cultural complexities and ironies: He's drawn to literary theory because it may parallel the role once played by Romanticism and Modernism--as he puts it, "the role of bringing together seemingly disparate phenomena (art and advertising, pleasure and politics) in the cause of conceptualizing human culture as a whole." He could hardly find a richer mix of art and advertising, pleasure and politics, than in a regionally renowned mall.

The mall has different impacts on Bettman, an expert on consumer decision-making, and Maguire, who studies public participation in environmental decisions. Maguire had vowed not to set foot in Southpoint, but agreed--with the utmost reluctance--to join in this scholarly investigation. She says the political process for approving the mall was flawed and didn't properly reflect public sentiment, is skeptical of the presumed economic benefits, and is convinced that this particular mega-development doesn't meet the standards for good planning.

If the modern mall has a famous antecedent, it was in an urban center rather than suburban surroundings, and its most famous philosopher was Walter Benjamin, a German-born author, translator, and critic, and a subject of Rolleston's scholarship. Benjamin conceived his Paris-based Arcades Project in 1927; he was still working on it when he took his own life in 1940, in flight from the Gestapo. The ideal in city planning articulated by Baron Georges Haussmann, the nineteenth-century street designer of Paris, "consisted of long straight streets opening onto broad perspectives," he wrote. "The temples of the bourgeoisie's spiritual and secular power were to find their apotheosis within the framework of these long streets." Benjamin considered the Paris shopping arcades the most important architectural form of the nineteenth century; his flaneur, or man-about-town, was "the observer of the marketplace," committed to the notion that "the fruits of idleness are more precious than the fruits of labor."

To Benjamin, shopping in the arcades was more akin to entertainment than to a household imperative: "It takes only a minute, only a step, for the forces of attraction to gather; a minute later, a step further on, and the passerby is standing before a different shop." The "dream houses of the collective," in his view, embraced the shopping arcades along with "winter gardens, panoramas, factories, wax museum, casinos, railroad stations." It's the department store--the ultimate promenade--where the urban dweller's "fantasies were materialized."

Though not exactly reminiscent of the boulevards of Paris, Southpoint's Main Street steeps itself in a view of history. One faÁade displays a blown-up Durham Herald-Sun from July 21, 1969, which was a notable debut day of sorts: "MAN SETS FOOT ON MOON," it reads in big block letters. The timeline of events then leaps to the newspaper's issue of March 9, 2002, debut day for the mall: "THE STREETS ARE ALIVE, Shoppers Rise Early to Discover Southpoint." (That page also preserves a report about more somber streets: "Bloody Day in Mideast Kills More Than 40.")

If it hasn't earned its place in history as a super mall, Southpoint is a "super-regional" mall. According to The Herald-Sun, in a story not receiving wall-display status, it might attract a regular customer base from within five to twenty-five miles while also drawing "destination" shoppers from as far as 100 miles away. Based on industry standards for sales-per-square-foot, the mall's developer, Urban Retail Properties of Chicago, expects Southpoint to sell $297 million in merchandise annually. That means $5.2 million in city and county sales-tax revenues--though such estimates don't account for lost sales at other stores or the cost of providing government services to the project. Southpoint's influence on South Square, which opened in 1975, was instantly devastating; within a month of Southpoint's opening, South Square's occupancy was down to 40 percent. Now it's virtually empty. For that matter, county tax assessors have publicly questioned the developer's tax-value projections.

In its first three days, Southpoint was the destination of choice for 300,000--many of whom had to endure long waits in traffic and fight for a parking place. The presumed millionth shopper was counted in late March and was awarded a $1,000 shopping spree. Around the time of Southpoint's opening earlier that month, Wharton was in Charlotte for the Atlantic Coast Conference men's basketball tournament. Southpoint was front-page news in Charlotte, and chartered bus trips were being planned. She says, "I couldn't believe it."

Believing in Southpoint means buying into packaged nostalgia. The mall is off an interstate highway in southern Durham. It's surrounded by suburbia and, as a retail community, it's in the middle of nowhere--an island of commerce in a sea of parking lots. (One local columnist wondered about the implied message of a "Durham 6 miles" sign on the mall roadway. The mall is in Durham, but the issue is to what extent it sees itself as being of Durham.) Still, the mall tries to establish visual identity with a downtown, and particularly downtown Durham. Red-brick building faÁades hint at tobacco warehouses. The name "Southpoint" itself appears down a fake smokestack. A press release mentions that floor tiles are meant to "resemble the texture of a sidewalk and further create the feeling that shoppers are walking along a city street." The visual theme of a street grid is repeated in wrought-iron railings, lampposts, and even wastebaskets.

Murals convey authentically old-timey advertising messages: "Delivered to your door--fresh milk. Your best food." "Russ's Used Cars--to fit your purse." "Kingston Toasted Corn Flakes--healthy mornings." "From the Arctic North to the Heart of the South--Atlantic Ice." There are some strange messages in that mix: "Try Joe's Delicious Bar-b-q--the flavor is the thing. Visit us at the corner of Main and Southpoint." Well, Main and Southpoint would seem like a "real" address on the faux Main Street, though the sign carries a frivolous phone exchange. The flavor is "the thing," but is Joe's the real thing?

Entertainment options abound in unexpected mall niches--like a conspicuously labeled Public Safety Office. Through a big picture window, we peer at a couple of security guards in front of a dozen TV monitors. Those monitors are focused on the mall's pedestrian "streets" and the parking lots. Other mall-goers join us at the window. Watching the guardians of the mall watching for troublemakers is itself an attraction.

This is a mall filled not just with brick but also with kids and dogs--of a heavy-metal variety. Children sculpted in metal share a bike and a friendly metallic dog trails beside them. Two girls wearing rain slickers and carrying umbrellas try to fend off the spray from a fountain. Kids are lying, kneeling, and surfing on manhole covers that carry "The Streets at Southpoint" logo. A boy in a wheelchair hurls a Frisbee to a dog (while a real mall girl climbs up to pet the fake dog). A girl (perhaps a Native American) is peddling copies of the Southpoint News while some cute canines rest at her feet.

The sculpted children "aren't just children," Rolleston declares. He considers them multicultural hybrids. "They're shaped children, quasi-diverse children, racially kind of in the middle--not obviously white or black children. So there is an attempt to lock in all our categories of diversity that may divide us in everyday life. But they can unify us in the mall setting."

Bettman says of the sculpted kids, "It's not high art or anything, but at least there's a statement in these things, and it is something different to look at." "Well," says Wharton, "the sculpture is better in quality than what we have on campus. Our university has no public sculpture worth looking at. It's a kind of nostalgic, figural art form. You can do children in a more abstract way, a more visually interesting way. But this fits in with the architecture."