Retailising Space

Architecture, Retail and the Territorialisation of Public Space

Mattias Karrholm

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317064473
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architettura
• Categoría: Pianificazione urbana e paesaggistica

Over the past few years there has been a proliferation of new kinds of retail space. Retail space has cropped up just about everywhere in the urban landscape: in libraries, workplaces, churches and museums. In short, retail is becoming a more and more manifest part of the public domain. The traditional spaces of retail, such as city centres and outlying shopping malls, are either increasing in size or disappearing, producing new urban types and whole environments totally dedicated to retail. The creation of these new retail spaces has brought about a re- and de-territorialisation of urban public space, and has also led to transformations in urban design and type of materials used, and even in the logic and ways through which these design amenities meet the needs of retailers and/or consumers. This book describes how the retailisation of public domains affects our everyday life and our use of the built environment. Taking an architectural and territorial perspective on this issue, it looks specifically at how retail and consumption spaces have changed and territorialised urban life in different ways. It then develops a methodology and a set of concepts to describe and understand the role of architecture in these territorial transformations.

1
Introduction

In recent decades we have witnessed a proliferation of new kinds of retail space. Retail space has cropped up just about everywhere in the urban landscape, at libraries, workplaces, churches and museums. In short, retail is becoming a more and more manifest part of the public domain. The traditional spaces of retail such as city centres and outlying shopping malls are either increasing in size or disappearing, producing new urban types and whole environments totally dedicated to retail. The proliferation of new retail space brings about a re- and de-territorialisation of urban public space that also includes the transformation of materialities and urban design, and even of the logic and ways through which these design amenities meet the needs of retailers and/or consumers.

In the wake of the consumer society, research has pointed out a tendency by which shopping seems to have less to do with just quality and price, and more with style and identity-making. Consumers appropriate certain brands and increasingly tend to use their shopping as means of social distinction and belonging (Zukin 2004). Retail architecture and design also tend to become more elaborate and complex, focusing on branding, place-making and the creation of a shopping-friendly atmosphere (Klingmann 2007, Lonsway 2009). Although consumption increasingly seem to be connected to symbolic values and differentiation rather than basic needs, and design increasingly seem to be about enhancing and supporting the mediation of these immaterial values, materialities (as always) continues to act in very concrete ways. The basic notion of this book is that the materialities of retail space are not just about symbolic values, theming, and so on, but that the new consumer society has also brought about new styles of material organisation, and new means of material design affecting not just our minds but also, and just as much, our bodies and movements in the urban landscape.

The main aim of this book is to develop a conceptual and analytical framework coping with the role of architecture in the ongoing territorial productions of urban public spaces in everyday life. This conceptual framework is developed through a series of essays focusing on recent transformations of urban retail environments. How does the retailisation of public domains affect our everyday life? And more specifically: What are the different roles played by the built environment in these transformations of public space? In The Oxford Companion to Architecture it is stated that:

Shops and stores are the most ephemeral of all building types. The ultimate architectural fashion victims, their need to remain up-to-date ensures that even the most expensive schemes, by the most renowned architects, have fleeting lifespans. (Oxford Companion to Architecture vol. 2 2009: 834)

Although this might create problems for the architectural historian, the transformative world of contemporary retail spaces is a gold mine for the architectural researcher interested in the role of architecture in the construction, stabilisation and destabilisation of spatial meanings and usages in our every day urban environment. This book takes on an architectural and territorial perspective on this issue, looking specifically at transformations by way of how urban consumption is architecturally and territorially organised, that is, it suggests and develops a kind architectural territorology.

The book thus combines a theoretical perspective on space and built form with discussions on retail and urban transformation. The book primarily takes its point of departure from research on built form and architecture, but it could also be seen as an attempt of integrating the field of architectural research with urban studies. Theoretical works that provide more advanced tools and concepts for the analysis of architecture in an urban context are still quite few, but well needed within the rising field of architectural research. Urban studies, on the other hand has traditionally tended to rely heavily on social theory and has not yet elaborated much on architectural or material theories

The book primarily takes a territorial perspective, focusing on how urban spaces are delimited, controlled, designed and inscribed with certain meanings, that is, territorialised. The book is thus part of the research tradition of architecture and the built environment, and the scientific field that one could call territorial studies or territorology (Brighenti 2006, 2010a, 2010b, 2010e, Kärrholm 2004, 2007). It is primarily ‘constructive’ in its approach, borrowing theories and concepts from philosophers and theoreticians such as Bruno Latour, John Law and Annemarie Mol, in order to develop a way of dealing with architecture and the urban environment as a place of constantly ongoing territorial transformations.

The book is organised around a series of more or less independent case studies, each pinpointing a certain aspect of the territorialisation process. I discuss the production of commercial territories in terms of deurbanisation, urban design, urban rhythms and building types through four different kinds of territorial processes: separation, stabilisation, synchronisation and singularisation. These processes are discussed empirically and theoretically throughout the book.

Empirically, the book collects a broad historical material, at times going back to the nineteenth century, but it focuses primarily on the consumer society as it has manifested itself from the 1990s and onwards. The investigations are focused on the case studies, for example, the historical evolution of retail spaces in Sweden, an investigation of the retail landscape of Malmö (Sweden’s third largest city with some 280,000 inhabitants in 2009), and a discussion of the retail building type evolution in post-industrial societies. The empirical studies made connect to a tradition within architectural research that focuses on the built environment and how it relates to the activities of its users (for example, Gehl 1980, 2010, Rapoport 1990, Hillier and Hanson 1984, Werne 1987, Hertzberger 1991, Markus 1993, Hillier 1996, Evans 1997, Dovey 1999, Habraken 1998, 2005, Nilsson 2010, Lang and Moleski 2010, just to mention a few). The qualitative study of Malmö is primarily based on studies of newspaper archives and planning documents from 1995–2009, observational studies and photographic documentation (mostly during 2006–2007, and 2009).

The book takes a European perspective, and the examples and cases used are mostly from Sweden. Sweden is quite comparable to other Western countries, but it has also been at the front edge of retail development (especially during the first decades after World War II), and certain examples of retail space evolution are thus quite manifest here, which makes Sweden provide good examples of the phenomena that I discuss (but which can be found elsewhere too). Retail can also be seen as an inherent and important aspect of the welfare state and its policies. Sweden, with its long history of welfare policies, makes a particularly interesting case when it comes to investigating the rise of the consumer society and its impact on public space. The historical documentation on retail space made by Bergman (2003), Mattson and Wallenstein (2010), and others also makes it possible to contextualise the empirical cases in a good way. It should, however, be noted that the contribution of this book is not foremost empirical (it is, for example, not intended to be a grand narrative of the evolution of Swedish retail in the 1990s). Rather, its contribution has to do with the general questions and theoretical considerations the empirical cases rise on the role of built form in the process of territorialisation. Although the Swedish case may not be typical, I hope nevertheless to illustrate aspects of how the retailisation of space territorialises aspects of everyday life in the public domain. The empirical cases are, by necessity, reductionist. They are temporary fixations that facilitate the development of new theoretical tools. The role of the empirical cases is thus to form basis for a discussion of new ways of looking at in public space transformation and for the development of analytical tools that can enable investigations and new perspectives on the role of built form in public space transformation and retail territorialisation.

Retail/Shopping Spaces, Architecture and Everyday Life

To begin with, let me clarify what kind of spaces I have addressed in this book. There are several interesting and intermingling spatial concepts on retail which have received interest during the last couple of decades, for example, consumption space, retail space and shopping space. Consumption space may, in its broadest sense, entail everything from arcades, department stores, casinos, and bowling alleys to housing areas, cruise ships and even whole cities (Miles and Miles 2004). Although the rise of the consumer society (Bauman 2007) is an important context for my investigation, I do not discuss the whole spectrum of possible places for consumption, but instead limit my considerations to urban space for shopping and retail. In Vernet and de Wit’s Boutiques and Other Retail Spaces, retail architecture is defined as: ‘those market spaces, both real and virtual, that affect the relationship between supply and demand’ (Vernet and de Wit 2007: 16). This would include open markets as well as shopping malls, boutiques and Internet stores. However, if we are to look at the act of retailing from an everyday perspective we also need to address the wider scope of spaces appropriated for shopping activities, that is, all shopping spaces. The spaces of shopping culture do not end in the store but continue out into the street and on to cafés, parking facilities and even all the way in to the private home, where the computer may play an important part in the production of shopping opportunities (cf. Gregson et al. 2002). In this book, my interest more specifically lies in the urban and public spaces that are designed or used to any extent for retail and/or shopping related activities, this would of course include shops and malls, but also cafés, pedestrian streets, railway stations and even more restricted and controlled places such as airports. My excursions do not, however, take me as far from public space as the home, and not as far from architectural space as the Internet. Retail architecture, or better put, retail spaces including larger retail areas, open air malls and pedestrian precincts, are thus main focus, but it must also be bourn in mind that shopping practices saturate the whole of the urban landscape. Opportunities to buy and sell pop up everywhere, and shopping involves a whole set of other activities and places (cf. Zukin 2004). It is also from the perspective of shopping as an activity that the transformation of public space becomes most apparent.Research and studies on shopping and retail have increased in recent decades, and these issues have become more and more important in the planning of cities, regions, municipalities, and so on. Consumption research has a long history with the work of theorists such as Thorstein Veblen, Max Weber, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and Jean Baudrillard (see for example, Miles and Miles 2004, or Hetherington 2004, for an introduction). There is also more pragmatic empirical research on consumption patterns and consumption behaviour, beginning as early as the 1930s and 40s in countries such as for example, Sweden (Ekström 2004, Ekström and Brembeck 2004). However, more widespread interest in shopping as a research area arose in connection with postmodernity, and more specifically with what is sometimes called ‘the cultural turn’ during the 1980s, and increased rapidly during the 1990s. Shopping became seen both as a part of our lifestyle and our society, and research focused, for example, on shopping as part of our everyday practices, as a social activity or as a meaning and identity-building activity (Miller et al. 1998, Gregson et al. 2002, Zukin 2004, Hetherington 2004). Shoppers were also sometimes described as a trope or a sign of the times, often based on the work of Baudrillard or Bauman (Shield 1992, Goss 1993, Gregson et al. 2002: 597).The consuming revolution and the start of the consumer society are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in time. There has always been an intimate relationship between markets and cities and between cities and public life. In northern Europe cities, some cities evolved around market places (for example, cities with generic names like, købstad, köping). In fact, the archaeologist Peter Carelli (2001) has discussed the evolution of a consumer culture as parallel to a process of urbanisation in the Swedish town of Lund as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, suggesting the possibility of conspicuous consumption as a kind of indicator of urbanity itself (Carelli 2001: 99–209). Some researchers argue that the consumer society has its roots in the sixteenth century with new goods, a growing interest in fashion, and investments in the trade infrastructure. Others argue that the consumer society developed in the wake of or even parallel to the Industrial revolution. Perhaps we can settle on Don Slater’s notion that the consumer society is intimately linked with the whole of the modern project, and that consumption has greatly influenced society over several centuries (and probably even longer). More interesting than the efforts of setting a specific date on the consumer society or describing some kind of linear progression is to study how different consumer cultures have evolved and transformed over the years, that is, a more genealogical or even cyclical approach (cf. Slater 1997: ch.1, Miles and Miles, 2004: 25–29).

From a contemporary perspective, the post-war period in general and the 1980s in particular are often singled out as important points in the history of consumerism. During the 1950s, mass consumption was well under way in most Western countries. Consumption then became an important aspect of the social community, where the goal of both the individual and the family was often ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ (Slater 1997: 12). During the 1980s, it has been argued that this slogan was in a sense reversed (at least if viewed from the perspective of advertising and business) to ‘keeping a difference from the Joneses’ (Slater 1997: 10). Marketing, advertising and design became increasingly important ingredients in a capitalist society and the issue of production was now in many cases subordinated to a focus on consumption. The 1980s are also often singled out as the time when the consumer society became visible, and when shopping started to take on a more constitutive role in the Western world, both for societies and for our social life and identity. Consumption became a way of creating identity and an important means of distinguishing oneself from other people, groups or classes.

Shopping spaces become more and more important parts of urban development, and they have even been described as emblematic of our time. In her book Landscapes of Power (1993), Sharon Zukin describes how our cities have gone from being ‘landscapes of production’, to being ‘landscape of consumption’. Miles and Miles take this even further in Consuming Cities (2004), where they describes how life in modern cities is reduced to the point where consumption has become the city’s primary function, arguing that: ‘the city has been consumed by consumption and as a result has lost track of its broader social role’ (Miles and Miles 2004: 172). For Bauman this change towards consumerism is seen as coupled with the fulfilment of immediate pleasures and a short-sightedness that leads to objectification and commodification of people, so even the consumer becomes a commodity (for example in Internet dating, Bauman 2007).

The new interest in consumption, retail and shopping is also evident in the field of architecture and urban design. Retail architecture was not much appreciated during architectural modernism and functionalism, and, for example, seldom made it into the compulsory course literature in architecture and architectural history (although there are a few exceptions, such as Eric Mendelssohn’s Shocken Buildings in Germany or perhaps William Crabtree’s Peter Jones department store in the UK). Today, architecture has become an important competitive tool, branding is the buzzword of the day (Klingmann 2007, Lonsway 2009) and a series of contemporary star architects like Jean Nouvel, Rem Koolhaas, Herman Hertzberger, Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos, and Daniel Liebeskind have taken the task of designing shopping centres and malls. Meanwhile, architects who used to be more anonymous are being raised to prominence. Victor Gruen (the father of the mall) is now celebrated or investigated in one book after another (Hardwick 2003, Wall 2001, Chung et al. 2001). An architect like Jon Jerde, specialised in retail facilities, has also attracted increasing attention. The move of retail architecture onto the scene of ‘high architecture’ began as early as the early 1970s with the influential pioneering work Learning from Las Vegas (Venturi, Scott Brown and Izenour 1972), following a more general post-modern ambition to erase the line between high and low culture. One of the seminal texts to raise this issue in architecture during the last decade is The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Chung et al. 2001), one of the books produced in Rem Koolhaas ‘Project on the City’.

The change and expansion of retail environments have also had a major impact on the city and on urban development in general. Graham and Marvin describe in Splintering Urbanism (1999) how shopping environments contribute to fragmentation of the urban landscape. The enclave planning of shopping centres has been adapted to central city locations, for examples as BIDs (Business Improvement Districts, a form of urban renewal projects, partly or wholly financed by private property owners and businesses) and pedestrian precincts, acting as a kind of ‘malls without walls’. New shopping centres and retail parks are growing up on the outskirts of towns and contribute to this fragmentation of the urban landscape. But Graham and Marvin also point out shopping as an important integrative factor. Trade and shopping are means of creating a living urban environment in which people can meet and see each other. In many cases this is done within the framework of large enclaves, described by Koolhaas in terms of bigness, by Graham and Marvin as rebundled complexes, and by Jerde as colonies of cohesion (Graham and Marvin 2001: 222–227). Shopping is thus not just something that threatens to destroy or fragment the city, but has also been put forward as something that can enrich city life. The important urban function of retail has been acknowledged by researchers of urban design since Jane Jacobs in the 1960s (Jacobs 2002, Gehl 1980, Hemmersam 2005, Bergman 2003). In fact, department stores became important public places already during the nineteenth century (Hetherington 1997, Bergman 2003), as they opened up new spaces in the city that were readily accessible to (middle-class) women. This is, in a sense, echoed in the interesting article by F. Erkip, and in her discussions on the introduction and role of shopping malls as important public spaces in Turkey during the 1990s (Erkip 2005). Today, the integration of shopping and city life has gone further than ever before. In The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (2001), Leong describes how shopping has developed and gradually expanded in size and scope to, in principle, saturate all public activities. Leong even states that ‘shopping has become one of the only means by which we experience public life.’ (Leong 2001b: 134). Shopping has outgrown the role of being an important urban function and become a necessary condition for urbanity itself. McMorrough develops similar thoughts in the same book, where he argues that shopping environments are increasingly becoming a kind of ideal for the city, a recipe for urbanity (McMorrough 2001a, Hemmersam 2005). The strategies of design and spatial organisation that were once developed for shopping centres are now used for city planning and urban design. But the influence is, of course, double, the town and its shopping environments reflect each other. The shopping mall want to become a city, the city wants to become a shopping mall. How does this equation balance? On the one hand, we have commercialised cities and urban life characterised by the privatisation, domestication, and commodification of public space (Zukin 1995, Atkinson 2003), and fragmentation of the urban landscape as a whole. On the other hand, commercial businesses and retail spaces are a constituent part of city life and a contributing factor to the integration of people and the possibility of interacting. Again: On the one hand retail and shopping might be seen as controlling, manipulating and even reducing the potential or richness of public life. On the other hand, shopping is something many people enjoy and (to some extent must) engage in, and as such it creates both opportunities and meaning in our live...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Retail Autonomisation – Territorial Separation
• 3 The Pedestrian Precinct – Territorial Stabilisation
• 4 Shopping and the Rhythms of Urban Life – Territorial Synchronisation
• 5 The Transformation of Retail Building Types – Territorial Singularisation
• 6 Architecture and the Production of Public Space – Territorial Complexities
• 7 Retailising Space (Towards an Architectural Territorology)
• Postscript: A Short Vocabulary
• References
• Index