ABSTRACT
The Beverly Centre is a three-level shopping mall sitting on a five-storey parking lot, at a major intersection in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. At street level is the Planet Hollywood restaurant with its iconic advertising image of a car entering the street wall. A constantly changing digital sign documents the world’s rising population and its declining acreage of rainforest for an audience primarily sitting in traffic (Figure 9.1). Across the globe, closer to both the population and the rainforest, is a city which is similar in more than size. Blok M Plaza in downtown Jakarta is a close cousin of the Beverly Centre and employs its urban wall to support a giant video screen flashing images to the passing, though often jammed, traffic (Figure 9.2). Los Angeles has a reputation for privileging wheels over feet, and for pioneering sequestered zones of safety in a dangerous urban public realm (Davis 1991; Flusty 1997). The main streets of Jakarta present one of the worst pedestrian environments in urban history. Only the poor walk anywhere, and to do so they must negotiate tiny strips of sidewalk which are often blocked. Yet through the portals of either of these malls one experiences an inversion of urban spatial experience. The difficulties and tensions of public space are eased as one enters a protected realm of consumption and spectacle. The enclosed retail environment of the private shopping mall was the most popular and successful new building type of the second half of the twentieth century. It is in many ways the quintessential building type of the age, embodying new and evolving forms of subjectivity, representation and spatial practice.
