by
Ethan Yerkes
In today’s world consumption is seen all around us varying from advertisements, shopping centers, and online shopping. Hartford, Connecticut is a great way to explore the sound of consumption with operational malls on the east and west side of the city. Through soundscapes, we are able to understand how malls are rapidly becoming replaced with online shopping allowing for a more swift purchasing process. Due to the Covid-19 virus malls all over the United States have seen a decline in consumers resulting in many malls shutting down. The closure of malls has progressively increased since the advancement of Amazon shopping; covid has only sped up this process of outdating malls because of the new world of online shopping.
This soundscape is a collection of three different malls around the Hartford area as well as sounds from the new era of online shopping. Two of these malls are Westfarms mall and The Shops at Buckland Hills mall which are still both operational today. The third mall was the Civic Center mall which was competing with both malls on the east and west side of Hartford which forced it to be repurposed due to a lack of demand. Now both Westfarms and Shops at Buckland Hills are competing against one of the largest online shops, Amazon; in this competition, soundscapes show how Westfarms is slowly losing business compared to Shops at Buckland Hills.
Beyond the primary focus of consumption in malls slowly dying, when comparing soundscapes from both operational malls gentrification can also be heard between the two. The huge era of suburbanization in the 1950s left many low-income and minority communities in the center of the city. Sound mark signals are what is heard when these audios are capturing the different communities shopping at each mall.
References
Lomuscio, J. (1998, May 3). Hartford Civic Center’s hard times. The New York Times. Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/1998/05/03/nyregion/hartford-civic-center-s-hard-times.html