Beyond consumption? Sociability and the mall as social infrastructure in Beijing
基于北京一家大型购物中心的田野调查，分析购物中心如何通过四种社交形式（陌生人共在、跨差异相遇、社会关怀、人际关系工作）成为社会基础设施，为理解消费空间与城市包容性提供新视角。
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.