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An Ode to the Wacky Worlds of West Edmonton Mall

Kate Black grew up roaming Canada’s temple of consumerism. In ‘Big Mall’ she explores ‘shopping for meaning.’

Christopher Cheung 15 Jul 2024The Tyee

Christopher Cheung reports on urban issues for The Tyee. Follow him on X @bychrischeung.

Kate Black has no plans to move back to Edmonton.

Vancouver is now her home. And whenever she tells people about leaving the city, they offer their congratulations.

But then they all feel the need to share one more thing with her: a story about the time they visited the great West Edmonton Mall.

The mall, often called West Ed by locals, is a sprawling 5.3 million square feet, the largest in Canada and the second largest in North America.

Aside from the shopping, West Ed is made up of many eye-catching, eyebrow-raising worlds. There’s the Galaxyland indoor theme park, the World Waterpark, the Ice Palace regulation-sized rink, the Professor Wem’s Adventure Golf mini-course, the underground Sea Life Caverns, the Wild West Shooting Centre and more. Many of these hold world records for “largest indoor” something or other.

And just in case you want to spend the night on site to take it all in, there’s the Fantasyland Hotel, with the insensitive relic designed and marketed as the “African” room, somehow still operational in the year 2024.

The place is a destination for tourists from around the world, but locals have a special relationship with the mall as they live their lives in its ever-expanding, evolving wings and corridors. Black grew up going to the mall. It was like a hometown within her hometown. And looking back at this complicated container of her coming of age, she found herself wanting to unpack its creation and what it has come to mean for all who’ve passed through.

Her book, Big Mall: Shopping for Meaning, was published earlier this year. It touches on weighty forces and analyzes our consumerist habits — everything from how capital transforms physical landscapes to why someone might want to catch a dolphin show while shopping for handbags — through the example of West Edmonton Mall, the alpha specimen of the mall species that now covers our planet.

Black was recently recognized by the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Arts Awards with an emerging artist prize, with compliments to the skill she demonstrates in her thoughtful shopping trip of a book. The awards jury described her writing as “sprawling and disciplined, intimate and global.”

Black opens the energetic volume with an amusing invocation for her investigation: “I guess I am interested in understanding why something so stupid has informed my whole life.”

A view of a large indoor pool features people floating on colourful inner tubes and, to the left of the frame, white lawn chairs set up against a fake 'beach' with the floor a sandy colour. Networks of long, colourful tubular waterslides tangle in the upper left quadrant of the frame.
West Edmonton Mall’s indoor wave pool, the world’s largest. Photo by IQRemix via Wikipedia, Creative Commons licensed.

A place of placelessness

The river near the mall had a heritage of commerce long before any Uniqlo or Urban Outfitters opened, where Cree people came to meet and trade.

The mall was opened in 1981, once promoted as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

It was developed by the Triple Five Corp., owned by the Ghermezians, an Edmonton-based family with Iranian-Jewish roots, who made their fortune buying up real estate at bargain prices ahead of the oil boom of the 1970s.

With each subsequent phase, the mall accumulated attractions and artificial streetscapes.

From here, Black eloquently captures the strange unreality and placelessness of malls like West Ed when they arrive on the scene, “a spray of brutalist mountains.” There’s the “thick vignette of a parking lot” that surrounds an “amorphous puzzle of material.”

These spaces are highly manufactured. The smell of Auntie Anne’s Pretzels, the exact molecules no matter which mall you encounter one, is the smell of globalization. The indoor streets — Europa Boulevard and Bourbon Street (now renamed the ridiculous BRBN st.) — are sanitized and air-conditioned copies of their inspirations, more Las Vegas than any global destination.

The geographer James Howard Kunstler talks about this in his influential 1993 book The Geography of Nowhere, a critique of suburbia; so does Marc Augé in his 1992 book Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.

“Inside [malls], we feel the totality of the world without meaningfully comprehending or impressing upon it,” writes Black. “Most have nothing to do with the actual landscape they’re built upon; there’s no such thing as a mall that hasn’t been inspired by another one in the vast swath of non-space.”

Can Edmonton and its supermall be authentic in the way that the lived-in neighbourhoods of cities like Toronto or New York are?

Black can’t help but acknowledge the strange comfort that even non-spaces like West Ed bring. In addition to the big thinkers like Kunstler and Augé, she surveys poems, documentaries and YouTube videos made by people fascinated by the mall.

She also turns to Reddit threads buzzing with users swapping West Ed stories. Everyone seems to long for that time when they encountered the mall during their personal coming of age, remembering details such as the humidity in the halls that seems to have gone away, the fire-breathing animatronic dragon that graced the movie theatre and the statue of a bronze whale, whose mouth you could climb inside and smelled like dirty coins.

A large animatronic dragon exhales a plume of flames against a darkened red background in an indoor space.
A large grey metallic sculpture of an open-mouthed whale stands in an oblong water feature in the galleria of a shopping mall.
While the fire-breathing animatronic dragon, top, has been removed from West Ed due to maintenance issues, many still reminisce about feeling its hot breath as children. Kids have long loved climbing into the whale of a mouth of the mall's sculpture Open Sea by Robin Bell, at bottom. Top photo by Stonagal via Wikipedia, Creative Commons licensed. Bottom photo by Matteso via Wikipedia, public domain.

There is something lovely about these memories. In these vignettes, the fact that the non-space of a mall is a soup of inorganic influences fades to the background.

Black shares plenty of her own mall memories in the book. They’re not pastoral poetry, but they are undeniably poetic.

“Sometimes, we would get to the mall before any of the stores had opened, eat cinnamon buns, and peer through the gate at the frozen roller-coasters,” she writes. “Those mornings, it felt like the mall was all ours.”

‘Dream-houses of the collective’

Black takes us through the many chapters of the gargantuan mall’s history, some of which readers might remember from the headlines.

There was the opening of the Mindbender roller-coaster in 1986, which derailed and killed three people.

There were incidents of crime at West Ed that caused adults to associate malls and the teens who frequented them with delinquency.

There’s the mall’s strange relationship with keeping animals, which came and went like “mirages,” from ostriches, peacocks, tigers and a gold tank of piranhas to a short-lived habitat called Sloth World.

The mall might be a place with a sense of placelessness, but it is a sprawling structure as well populated as any city. As a result, it undoubtedly has all the complications of any built environment, and Black helps us make sense of what it means to grow up in such a place and for the mall to attempt to outdo itself with spectacle.

Walter Benjamin called the shopping arcades of Paris, France, a precursor to the mall, the “dream-houses of the collective.”

To this day, malls are still marketed as places of fulfilment and a kind of utopia. As a slogan once declared, “Do what you want to do, be what you really want to be, and find yourself at West Edmonton Mall.”

Where does capitalism end and our individuality begin?

Instead of spending her formative years on the streets of a city, Black, like many, was raised by “an unbounded state of escalators, H&Ms, and food courts.”

Readers who have any distaste for malls should set them aside and join her on this anthropological adventure and critical look at an everyday space that continues to draw us in.  [Tyee]

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