ABSTRACT
The city in which I live contains the largest shopping mall and indoor leisure centre in the world, West Edmonton Mall, in Alberta: Canada’s Texas. It comprises around 800 stores, a seven-acre Waterpark with year-round tropical climate and fauna, a fifteen-acre amusement park with twenty-five of the most technologically-advanced rides, a 2.5 acre indoor lake equipped with four ‘seaworthy’ submarines where dolphins play and perform, a 360-room Fantasyland Hotel containing ‘themed’ rooms, a National-Hockey-Leaguesize ice arena, a Casino, nineteen movie theatres and an eighteen-hole miniature golf course. All this is arranged along a two-mile long, two-level concourse, covering the equivalent of forty-eight city blocks, with fifty-eight entrances and parking space for 20,000 vehicles. With eleven major department stores, over 150 restaurants, fifty-five shoe shops and thirty-five jewellery stores, it is a place where almost every conceivable good and service can be bought. You can eat, walk and shop all day here without running out of choice. Truly, it is ‘one of the definitive shopping events of our age’ (Shields 1989:159).
