ABSTRACT
As a convenient lifestyle choice that concentrated desirable elements of consumption within a single protective environment, the ‘classic’ American mall offered itself as an alternative to the city centre. If the shopping mall thrived by removing the perceived threat of the urban realm, it also impinged upon its freedoms. Architectural historians Hiromi Hosoya and Markus Schaefer have observed how the amorphous growth of the Tokyo Metropolitan Area was exploited by free-enterprise pioneers of the private railways that ferried its commuters. David Graham Shane, a US based architectural and urban theorist, describes a scenario in which a ‘layered, informational, urban design approach to podium and tower megablocks demonstrates the creation of new, three-dimensional urban spaces that mix uses in previously unforeseen ways’. Dieter Hassenpflug, director of the Bauhaus University-Weimar faculty of architecture, has undertaken an in-depth analysis of urban China that provides useful insight into the syntax of its ‘public’ spaces.
