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'The Gruen Transfer'

By Nicholas Gruen - posted Wednesday, 28 May 2008


Gruen proposed a 20-year building program to leading department store firm J.L. Hudson Company starting in Detroit. He proposed the construction of four malls on the (then) fringes of the city - Eastland, Northland, Southland, and Westland. Sound familiar?

His next mall in Minnesota in 1956 was hermetically sealed from the elements - air conditioned “eternal spring”. Among the shops were fountains, sculptures, arcades and courtyards bathed in natural light where people could meet for a coffee. There was even an aviary.

The New Yorker described him as a “a sort of intracontinental guided missile” with “heavy brows, unruly dark hair, and a no less unruly Viennese accent” shuttling between five national offices boasting that “the merchants in his malls would save our urban civilization”;

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Sometimes self-interest has remarkable spiritual consequences. As art patrons, merchants can be to our time what the Church and the nobility were to the Middle Ages.

He proposed banning manufacturing and warehouses from New York and putting all cars and trucks underground. The sooner we helped taxi-drivers - “leading promoters of urban hysteria - to be less hysterical the better”.

Gruen even appealed to the cold war zeitgeist. With the population farcically rehearsing “duck and cover” drills, malls were located away from industrial targets and able to serve as first aid shelters if necessary.

But Gruen’s modernist industrial dreaming somehow went awry. Civic spaces didn’t pay rent like shops and so were rationalised.

The “Gruen Transfer” became psychologists’ jargon for that moment when the disoriented customer yields, eyes glazed, to the muzak, the timeless smooth, anodyne décor and the endless arcades.

Gruen disavowed this kind of manipulation. But he wasn’t beyond explaining to clients how relieving “little Mrs Shopper” of her suburban boredom, one might also relieve her of her cash.

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By the late 1960s malls were contributing to urban decline. They sucked out some of the civic and commercial life from the inner suburbs and isolated the more affluent whites in outer suburbs from the inner suburbs’ growing poverty, racial problems and social dysfunction.

As Detroit and other mall ringed cities went up in flames Victor made another Gruen Transfer, this time back to Vienna where he defended his legacy and lamented what he now called the “Sad Story of Shopping Centers”.

And the suburban fringe of Vienna housed a new development. A shopping mall.

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First published in the Australian Financial Review on May 27, 2008.



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About the Author

Dr Nicholas Gruen is CEO of Lateral Economics and Chairman of Peach Refund Mortgage Broker. He is working on a book entitled Reimagining Economic Reform.

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