Acculturating the Shopping Centre

Global historiography at its best! With case studies from diverse sites such as Venenuela, Iran, Indonesia and the UK, this collection of essays by an international cast of scholars offers a long needed discussion of the complex global forms and affects of the much maligned (sub)urban shopping mall.

Vikramaditya Prakash, University of Washington, USA

This collection of brilliant scholarly essays sheds light on what is arguably the only building type whose signature has transformed the urban and sociological landscapes of contemporary megalopolises the world over. The metamorphosis of the functional and geometrical principles characterizing the city core has been accelerated by the transformation of main streets into shopping centre, while central, pedestrian street-like spaces have mutated in scale into the creation of urban mall. Janina Gosseye and Tom Avermaete have edited a book that demonstrates that this `(mall)eable' modernist type is far from being a `non-lieu' -- rather, it is the ritual space of a new citizenship. Maristella Casciato, Senior Curator Architecture, Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, USA

Acculturating the Shopping Centre shows how these often-stereotyped places, built across the global south since the 1950s, were dynamic hybrids, variously shaped by shoppers, politicians, developers, builders and citizens. The authors reach beyond the zero sum critiques of consumption to show the diversity of shopping centres - as physical sites and as cultural situations. The essays also consider how, under the guise of shopping, the socio-historical concept of the urban transforms, re-making cultural norms, creating new sites of communal experience, and requiring new forms of global inquiry. The mall is dead, long live the mall!

David Smiley, University of Columbia, USA