Top Tech City: Minneapolis, MN

the city’s high-tech persona is starting
to take shape for me, but there is one last place I want to see before I leave. If Minneapolis and St. Paul are the Twin Cities, the Mall of America is their mutant conjoined triplet, a self-contained city on their periphery. It is the largest mall in the country, with 520 stores, 86 places to eat and 12,550 parking spaces. The mall’s 2:1 ratio of electronics stores to bookstores seems to be a fair indicator of Minneapolitans’ technophilia.


One of the truisms about good high-tech design is knowing when low-tech will suffice. There is no heating system in the 4.2-million-square-foot building; the entire place is heated by the lighting
system and the body heat of tens of thousands of bustling shoppers. It is a biosphere of consumers. The 400 trees in the mall’s vast atrium are kept pest-free by tens of thousands of ladybugs. There is a 1.2-million-gallon aquarium and a whole amusement park under a roof big enough to dock the Hindenburg. (This may be the only place on Earth one could feasibly pick up Wi-Fi on a roller coaster.) The completed light rail slithers from
the Skyway in downtown Minneapolis straight into the belly of the beast.


My first thought is that the Mall of America is like the Death Star—that is, if Storm Troopers shopped at places like the Piercing Pagoda, Wallet World and the Smoothie Authority. But then it hits me: It’s this mall that most truly replicates the domed City of the Future I had sketched as a kid. It’s got the insularity, the utterly synthesized environment—although I certainly wouldn’t have characterized it this way back when I was dreaming up these visions, it is the final triumph of techno-kitsch.


The mall, like my childhood drawing, I realize, is an artificial city.


But a truly great tech city—messy, organic, evolving—is defined by its people and by its ideas, not by its neat containment beneath futuristic domes. And so, after spending a couple hours in my childhood City of the Future, I walk back out through the vast atrium, board the light rail, and head back downtown,
to the city that far more legitimately deserves that crown.