ABSTRACT
In ‘Westfield Stratford City: A Walk Through Millennial Urbanism’ Alex Rhys-Taylor calls our noses to attention as he guides us through the mega-mall and upwards on its lifts and escalators. Ostensibly public, largely private, tangled with high-finance, risk and property speculation, digitised, under surveillance, corporately globalised and culturally hybridised and marked by finite distinctions in culture and socio-economic status, Westfield’s success lies in the extent to which the space has come to fully reflect the current social texture of twenty-first-century London. As this chapter details, the layout of the mega-mall, and the clustering of specific symbols and sensoria within it, reiterate specific ways of sensing, and making sense of class, citizenship and ethnicity.
