For decades architects have dismissed the spatial quality of shopping malls as junkspace, and sociologists have cursed the mall as the death knelt of public space, but the mall continues to attract capital, people as well as mass gatherings. In the last year, for example, shopping malls in the suburbs of Sao Palo have been repeatedly appropriated for so-called rolezinhos: thousands of poor, young Brazilians come, mill around and leave. What is it about this supersized commercial machine that lends itself to such corporeal appropriation? What features of its materiality correspond with the desire to lay claim to the space as public space and enact the dramas of urban live? How is it that this generic, homogeneous and de-singularized spatial arrangement becomes a place of projected escape, a safe transit into an imaginary elsewhere?

The talk was given at the conference "Poetics of Infrastructure" in Vienna on December 13, 2014. This extract is part of the Issue Poetics of Infrastructure.