But on to your post: I really like your descriptive term, “collaboration mall.” As a city person (and yeah, Victoria is a smaller city, but it’s pretty dense and urban and walkable), I’m of course loathe to admit that the suburbs might be places that produce appropriate symbols (”mall”) for civitas / civic life. But I can remind myself that in the 1920s Walter Benjamin wrote about 19th century Parisian arcades as localities of social meaning (and manufacture of meaning) — and what were the arcades but urban forerunners of suburban malls?

I’d say that the urban street is still more democratic/ porous/ open, if only because it really is public space, vs. private or semi-private. But the mall can bring together all sorts of different (including “regular”) people, and it’s a great term (compared to “street”) because it acknowledges the reality of markets, fees for services, settings for enterprise, and consumer platforms.

I’m at the very beginning of trying to create a community aggregator type service here, and your suggestion of a “collaboration mall” is intriguing. Just as with Doc’s entry on infrastructure, I find it helps my thinking when one (physical) thing typically seen in one context is transposed into another (more abstract) context. Till now, I was thinking for example of “public space” (physical) and how that manifests online (abstract). But narrowing that space to a mall brings things into better focus.