When it’s 115  degrees outside and wildfire smoke turns the sky orange, the mall may be the most democratic shelter left in America. Cooled, accessible and — unlike curated outdoor plazas — gloriously unoptimized, malls are emerging as overlooked climate infrastructure.

For years we treated the mall as a punchline, a relic of suburban capitalism. Lately I’ve started to wonder if we gave up on it too soon. The mall still does something no other space quite manages: It holds us both physically and emotionally, offering shelter, structure and relief. As a tired parent who’s walked malls across three generations and two continents, I think we might need it more than ever.

Malls, as architecture critic Alexandra Lange reminds us in her 2022 book “Meet Me by the Fountain,” have always been more than sites of consumption. They’re spaces of longing, architecture shaped by aspiration. Her book tracks how they became both ubiquitous and easy to scorn. But as a therapist, former historian and reluctant participant in late capitalism, I’ve come to believe something quieter: the mall offers a kind of containment nothing else does.

Before we talk about climate collapse or third spaces, it’s worth remembering what the mall used to be.

Before I was allowed to roam the city, I was allowed to roam the mall. My first unsupervised play-dates happened under fluorescent lights. The only rule? Don’t leave the building. Inside was freedom: looping paths, a food court full of choices, the thrill of pretending to be older than I was. The mall gave me low-stakes independence.

I hadn’t thought much about that until recently, when I took my kids to a mall in Daly City to check out the new Korean grocery store. They froze at the entrance, eyes wide. All these shops are…inside? Escalators, a jump house, a slime-making kitchen — the place felt magical, and not just to them. I felt it too: space, light, movement, freedom wrapped in structure.

I used to work in UX design, so I can tell you that the whole platform game is to make buying feel like sliding down a frictionless chute. Teams of brilliant people spend years optimizing sales flows to be idiot-proof and irresistible — less a purchase than a gravitational event.

The mall is the opposite. At the slime kitchen my kids dragged me to, the young clerk couldn’t say whether they’d still be open when we got back from the bathroom. That’s the analog miracle of the mall: imperfect, unoptimized, wildly human. Slime (now drying on my coat and car) cost us 20 minutes of negotiation and several awkward glances. Somehow, I loved it.

There was no parking lot to cross between stores. No curatorial pressure. No tastefully horrified onlookers. Just space that knew how to hold us.

That desire to be in public without performing and to explore selfhood through ambient togetherness still lives. As Julie Beck wrote in The Atlantic, the mall was once a “third place” between home and school — a space where teens could wander, stall and become. Today’s “nice” shopping zones are open-air plazas or lifestyle villages that offer the opposite: curated exposure. Parents stay on high alert, managing children, faces and carts.

And yet the mall remains stubbornly pro-social. Online, I can scroll Amazon all day and never bump into anyone’s politics, perfume or bad jokes. At the mall, I can eavesdrop on a British man telling an American man just how popular his cat would be in a retirement community while my kids run wild. That friction is its civic gift.

We used to mock malls for their lack of windows and artificial lighting, calling them manipulative, designed to distort time and trap you inside. In an era when parking lots shimmer like mirages and hurricane warnings ping our phones, the sealed, self-contained quality of the mall can feel almost parental: Don’t worry about that for a while. You’re with me. I’ve got this. The shiny tiles and beige drywall that once seemed sterile now feel protective, even generous.

During California’s worst wildfire seasons, officials literally told people to shelter in malls. Their industrial-strength HVAC was cool before it was cool. We used to joke that malls were bunkers for capitalism; turns out they’re also just bunkers.

My grandmother in Alabama mall-walked for exercise because it was too hot outside. She strolled past kiosks and fountains, never buying anything. Decades later in Nairobi, where I lived for several years, the mall served a similar purpose: a permeable commons where middle-class families could be together in public. When the 2013 attack at Westgate Mall happened, my partner and I had been on our way there. We were rerouted to another mall, where we sat with friends, stunned. Even in grief and fear, the mall was where we went to feel enclosed and be with others.

Our American versions have been ridiculed as sterile, tasteless, wasteful. Fair enough. But those critiques often come from people with other places to go. For latchkey kids, exhausted parents, neurodivergent children in loud outfits, elders with nowhere else to walk — the mall wasn’t just commerce. It was containment. Practice ground for freedom.

Pop culture tracks our shifting dread. In George Romero’s 1978 “Dawn of the Dead,” the mall is a fortress and a critique. Survivors barricade themselves inside while zombies shuffle through aisles like dead-eyed shoppers, capitalism eating itself alive. In “The Last of Us,” however, the mall is something sweeter: a romantic wonderland for two teenagers, a glowing relic of pre-collapse innocence. We used to fear the mall’s manipulations; now we’re charmed by its innocence.

We spent decades sneering at malls. They were called tacky, spiritually bankrupt, capitalism’s waiting room. Now they’re our life rafts. The same food court where I once guzzled a two-dollar Orange Julius might be the best place to survive a heat dome. It’s bleakly comic, like learning the apocalypse will be catered by Auntie Anne’s.

Malls have never been neutral, of course. Black and Brown teens have long been shadowed by security; queer kids policed for how they dress. Safety in the mall has always been unevenly granted. And yet, imperfectly, malls still offer one of the last places where people across race, class and generation can share space without a reservation.

When we left the Daly City mall, my father-in-law — a lifelong Marxist — looked around the jump house and slime station and said, “You know, the mall might be one of the better collective experiences we’ve got going.”

If the climate keeps cracking and the world keeps spinning, we may find ourselves back inside. For shelter, and for the kind of messy, semi-public togetherness we’re losing elsewhere.

This post was originally published on Next City.