Beyond consumption? Sociability and the mall as social infrastructure in Beijing

This article engages and adds to the literature on social infrastructure (SI) and malls with an ethnographic account of an inner-city, large-scale mall in Beijing, China. While recent SI research has explored various public, commercial, recreational, religious, and digital spaces, malls remain largely overlooked in this evolving scholarship. Taking a sociability-focused, user-centered infrastructural approach and drawing on my fieldwork, I analyze how the mall actualizes its potential as SI across four registers of sociability, namely pleasurable co-presence of strangers, cross-difference encounters, social care, and personal relationship work. This article highlights the dynamic interplay among people, the social, and infrastructure by tracing the micro-level processes through which urban inhabitants navigate everyday life in the mall while simultaneously animating it as SI. I argue that excavating the potential of malls as SI provides an alternative perspective for understanding the relationship between consumption spaces and inclusive urban milieux.