From Mall to New Jerusalem: A Spatial Reflection on Longing, Decay, and Divine Presence

Introduction: Between Longing and Concrete

Today, the American mall resembles both a monument and ruins. What was once envisioned as a center for communal life has, in many places, become a shell of its former self. Walking through an abandoned mall, I see what it was meant to be, but fountains now run dry, corridors eerily silent, anchor stores turned into storage units or gyms. However, even in decay, the concept of the mall points to something deeper than economic failure. In other words, it reflects a larger theological failure, the inability to create true paradise apart from divine presence.

Photo credit: Matthew Christopher, Abandoned America @abandonedameric

In this reflection, I hope to explore how the American mall offers a kind of pseudo-eschatology, a manufactured paradise whose spatiality parallel, and ultimately fall short of the New Heaven and Earth described in Revelation 21–22. Using insights from spatial theory, I argue that the mall becomes a shadow of Babylon, while the New Jerusalem reveals what human longing was always directed toward: God’s presence among His people in a space of justice, healing, and unbounded welcome.

The Original Vision: Gruen’s Hope and the Birth of the Mall

Following World War II, America saw a major boom in the economy and urban development. Interstate highways were being built, and the suburbs were growing rapidly with many people having more money to spend. The first enclosed mall in America, Southdale Center, opened in 1956 in Edina, Minnesota. Its architect, Victor Gruen, was an Austrian-born Jew who had fled Europe during the rise of Nazism. Gruen designed the mall not as simply a shopping center, but as a civic space, something like a modern-day agora. Inspired by European town squares, his vision included walkability, public art, conversation, and even housing and schools alongside retail. In other words, Gruen’s vision resembled that of an enclosed city where all of life and community could be enjoyed.

Gruen's vision for a center in Fort Worth, Texas 

However, developers had different plans. They loved the retail model, but discarded Gruen’s broader civic purpose. What was meant to be a space of human flourishing became, a site of consumer manipulation and exclusion. Later in life, Gruen would later disown the entire concept, calling malls “bastard developments.” In a sense, his disillusionment echos that of a biblical prophet watching his city fall into idolatry. His intended space of welcome became a temple to profit.

While Gruen’s vision was mainly driven by the hatred of automobiles and their impact on urban spaces, his solution is one that is noble if not ideal for creating places where community and people can gather. The inclosure of the mall was meat to be inward looking, not as a means to keep people focused on spending but rather as a way to shelter pedestrians from cars and all that comes with them, fumes, and noise. It vision was to provided a break from the busyness of life.

The Mall as False Paradise: Spatial Theology and the Imitation of the Eschaton

In its heyday, the mall offered more than convenience, it offered a vision. Bright skylights mimicked heavenly light. Fountains and indoor trees symbolized oasis. Open walkways and food courts mimicked gathering spaces. However, this was a curated openness, bounded by surveillance, security, and unspoken class barriers. As Edward Soja’s Thirdspace theory suggests, the mall represents a tension between Firstspace (material design), Secondspace (imagined experience), and Thirdspace (lived, contested practice). The mall promised Thirdspace, but only under the ideal of commerce.

Like Babylon in Revelation aka Rome, it was filled with luxuries but void of presence. It excluded the very people Jesus welcomed. It operated under scarcity, not abundance. The mall’s structure is not just flawed, it is theologically distorted, an attempt to simulate what only God can create: shalom. Revelation 18:9-20 shows how the world mourned when Babylon fell. All the convenience and profit gained from the city is gone. The mourning appers to be placed inwards as well. Mourning purely for the loss of the individual things people would lose from not being able to trade and profit there.

Decaying Malls and the Judgment of Space

Today, many malls have fallen into disrepair. I have walked through many of their remains, vacant storefronts, dried up fountains, and flickering lights. These places now carry a post-apocalyptic quality, similar to that of Babylon after its fall in Revelation 18. These architectural ruins expose what was always true: this space could not sustain the longings it promised to fulfill.

In a way, the mall becomes a kind of parable. Its decay reveals the danger of spatial imagination built on anything less than God’s presence. The very features once seen as comforting, now feel artificial and fake. The mall failed not because it was too ambitious, but because its ambition lacked a foundation in divine presence. In other words, it was a temple without a god.

Resurrection or Renovation? The Ambiguity of Reclaimed Space

Even through all this, many malls are not left to decay, they are being reimagined and repurposed. Now, churches meet where anchor stores once stood. Medical clinics replace food courts. Apartments are where parking lots sprawled. In one mall I visited, the anchor store had become a gym; another had turned its second level into a storage unit. Lifestle centers are popping up as space that are communities reminiscent of malls but cater to more than just consumerism. These renovations are not meaningless. They speak to a deep human desire to redeem space. In other words, to bring life where there once was decay.

Grace Community Church in Ballston Quarter, Arlington, VA

Theologically, this raises an important question: Is this resurrection, or just rebranding? Revelation shows us that Babylon cannot simply be cleaned up and called Jerusalem. Babylon has to fall. However, our impulse to re-inhabit fallen space can sometimes echo the eschatological impulse of restoration, if, and only if, the new space fosters healing, justice, and divine presence. A mall repurposed into a shelter or community center may point toward the kingdom. But a mall turned gym may still preach the gospel of self-optimization rather than self-giving love.

Revelation’s Spatial Theology: The New Jerusalem and the Healing of Space

Revelation 21–22 offers a vision of space as it should be: “Look, God’s dwelling is with humanity” (Rev 21:3). This city is not built from economic ambition rather it descends from God. Its gates are never shut (21:25); its light comes from the Lamb (21:23). It is not designed to extract but to give: “I will freely give to the thirsty from the spring of the water of life.” (21:6). All people groups are invited and gather within its walls (21:26). A major componenent of the wall was that it provided security and assurance. Prior to John penning Revelation, many of the seven churches to which he writes were affected by a major earthquake that ripped people from their homes and left them to fend for themselves in a way outside the city walls that had crumbled. John painting this ideal city as one having walls would have been assuring to them as it should be for us. The spaces we build up and the spaces we tear down can affect us more than we might realize.

The spatial features matter. There is no temple, because “the Lord God the Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.” (21:22). The space is marked not by commodity or commercialism  but by communion. The Tree of Life yields fruit in every season, and its leaves are for the healing of the nations (22:2). This is not just a better space, it is a transformed space, where desire meets fulfillment and presence replaces performance.

Concluding Reflections: Living Toward the City to Come

The mall and the New Jerusalem both respond to human longing. One through structure and consumption; the other through presence and gift. One has gates but keeps people out. The other has gates but leaves them open. The mall may mimic Eden, but only the New Jerusalem restores it.

For the Church today, especially in America, this invites reflection. Are we curating and fostering spaces that reflect Revelation’s vision, or are we rebuilding Babylon under new branding? Are our worship spaces open, healing, and Christ-centered, or simply cleaner, more efficient malls?

In the end, Revelation calls us not just to critique failed spaces, but to live toward a better one. We are people of the city to come, not the mall that fades. “I also saw the holy city, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared like a bride adorned for her husband.” (Rev 21:2). Our task then, is not to simulate that city, but to inhabit its hope even now.