ABSTRACT

Acculturating the Shopping Centre examines whether the shopping centre should be qualified as a global architectural type that effortlessly moves across national and cultural borders in the slipstream of neo-liberal globalization, or should instead be understood as a geographically and temporally bound expression of negotiations between mall developers (representatives of a global logic of capitalist accumulation) on the one hand, and local actors (architects/governments/citizens) on the other. It explores how the shopping centre adapts to new cultural contexts, and questions whether this commercial type has the capacity to disrupt or even amend the conditions that it encounters.

Including more than 50 illustrations, this book considers the evolving architecture of shopping centres. It would be beneficial to academics and students across a number of areas such as architecture, urban design, cultural geography and sociology. 

chapter |17 pages

Introduction

A malleable type: acculturating the shopping centre

chapter 2|26 pages

Eastern promises

chapter 3|27 pages

The Latin American shopping centre

Cultural translation, symbolic adaptation and typological evolution of commercial architecture in Latin American cities

chapter 5|16 pages

A domesticated shopping mall in modern Tehran

The (re)development of Ekbatan

chapter 6|20 pages

Re-centring Tema

From isotropic commercial centres to an intense infrastructure of street-vending

chapter 7|17 pages

The Boulevard Commercial Project in Manado, Indonesia

Trickled-down globalization versus a catalysed super-local

chapter |11 pages

Coda

The travelling type: how buildings and practices migrate across cultures