Shopping Towns Europe: Commercial Collectivity and the Architecture of the Shopping Centre, 1945-1975

Description

Shopping Towns Europe is the first book to explore the introduction and dissemination of the shopping centre in Europe. European shopping centres are often assumed to be no more than carbon copies of their American precursors - however the wide-ranging case studies featured in this book reveal a very different story. Drawing connections between architectural history, political economy and commerce, together these studies tell us much about the status and role of modernist design, the history of consumption, and the rapidly-changing social, urban, and national contexts of post-war Europe. The book's eighteen chapters explore case studies spanning the continent on both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Britain and The Netherlands to Sweden and the USSR. The focus is on the three decades following the first introduction of the new typology in 1945, tracing the variety of typological manifestations that occurred in widely different contexts, from Keynesianism to communism to military dictatorship. The book also explores the role of the shopping centre in urban reconstruction, and examines how new shopping centres were designed to elicit specifically modern behaviour and introduce new conceptions of collectivity into citizens' everyday lives. Please note that due to permissions restrictions, several images which do appear in the print edition of this book do not feature in the ebook versions.

Janina Gosseye is a postdoctoral research fellow at TUDelft, the Netherlands, and a member of the ATCH at the University of Queensland, Australia. She has co-edited several books, including Hot Modernism: Queensland Architecture 1945-1975 (2015), Water Urbanisms (2008), Reclaiming (the Urbanism of) Mumbai (2009) and The Specific and the Singular - Architecture in Flanders (2010). Tom Avermaete is professor of architecture at TU Delft, the Netherlands. He is the author of Another Modern: the Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005), and co-editor of Colonial Modern: Aesthetics of the Past, Rebellions for the Future (2010) and Structuralism Reloaded: Rule-Based Design in Architecture and Urbanism (2011).

A methodologically refreshing intervention that nevertheless manages to be entirely part of an ongoing historiographical moment. This is very much to its credit, and the novel perspective it offers is likely to prove enlightening to historians of modern architecture, of mass consumption, and most especially of Modern Europe. * EuropeNow * This valuable collection shows how civic and commercial agendas converged in the urban planning and architecture of new shopping centers throughout Europe in the decades after World War II. It makes a compelling case that these places helped shape a "pervasive modernity," albeit one that could not, in itself, reconcile the values of collective societies with the juggernaut of consumer culture. * Joan Ockman, Senior Distinguished Fellow at the University Pennsylvania School of Design and Visiting Professor at Cornell University School of Architecture, USA * Shopping Towns Europe is a tour de force of pan-European research collaboration. It draws together scholarship from all over Europe to overturn the usual story of the American origins of the shopping mall, completely changing our understanding of this new urban building type. * Adrian Forty, Professor Emeritus of Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK * The book fills a remarkable gap in the historiography of postwar European architecture... Avermaete and Gosseye have done a splendid job in bringing together scholars from all over Europe. A valuable book that enriches our understanding of a crucial period. * Hilde Heynen, Professor of Architectural Theory at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium *