Shopping and Urbanity: Emerging Assemblages of Main Street, Mall, and Power Centre

ABSTRACT

Car-dependent cities of the mid-late twentieth century transformed urban shopping as shopping centres became privatised and separated from urban life – traditional main streets were often replaced by suburban malls and then power centres (big-box clusters). We identify 13 emerging synergies between these retail types and critique the ways the synergies may foster or endanger urban public life. This evidence suggests contradictory trends: a return to urbanity with more fine-grained, mixed-use, and pedestrian-friendly shopping, juxtaposed with anti-urban tendencies of entrenched car-dependency and sophisticated private control. The role of planning in creating resilient urbanity is at stake.

KEYWORDS:

• Shopping
• retail
• urbanity
• privatisation
• assemblage

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Fujie Rao

Fujie Rao is Assistant Professor of Architecture at the School of Design in Shanghai Jiao Tong University. He has a PhD from the University of Melbourne (Urban Design and Planning) and a MA from the University of Alberta (Human Geography and Planning). He has broad research interests in urban design/planning, urban morphology, and human/urban/critical geography, in particular focusing on the resilience and urbanity of emerging shopping morphologies, the rise of online retailing and the impact on cities, and Deleuzian assemblage thinking.

Kim Dovey

Kim Dovey is Professor of Architecture and Urban Design and Director of InfUr- (Informal Urbanism Research Hub) at the University of Melbourne. He has a PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and has long researched social issues in architecture and urban design mostly focused on understandings of ‘place’ at a range of scales and types. Books include ‘Framing Places’ (Routledge 2nd ed 2008), ‘Fluid City’ (Routledge 2005), Becoming Places (Routledge 2010), Urban Design Thinking (Bloomsbury 2016), and Mapping Urbanities (Routledge 2018). Theoretical interests include understanding cities as complex, resilient, and self-organised assemblages.