Eine Einkaufsvision im Wandel: aktuelle Publikation zum Phanomen Shopping Mall

Hong Kong is the twenty-first-century paradigmatic capital of consumerism. Of all places, it has the densest and tallest concentration of malls, reaching tens of stories. Hong Kong’s malls are also the most visited, sandwiched between subways and skyscrapers. These mall complexes have become cities in and of themselves, accommodating tens of thousands of people who live, work, and play within a single structure. Mall City features Hong Kong as a unique rendering of an advanced consumer society. Retail space has come a long way since the nineteenth-century covered passages of Paris, which once awed the bourgeoisie with glass roofs and gaslights. It has morphed from the arcade to the department store, and from the mall into the “mall city”—where “expresscalators” crisscross mesmerizing atriums. Highlighting the effects of this development in Hong Kong, this book raises questions about architecture, city planning, culture, and urban life. “At the nexus of density, humidity, topography, and prosperity, Hong Kong has spawned more malls per square mile than any place on earth. This fantastic book decodes and graphically depicts an environment both apart and ubiquitous, a convulsive form of public space in a liquid territory where intensely contested politics, commerce, and sociability weirdly merge in a city like no other.” —Michael Sorkin, distinguished professor of architecture of the City University of New York “Hong Kong may be packed with the most shopping malls per square kilometer in the world, but Mall City is packed with the most drawings, information, and fascinating mall facts. The book dissects, categorizes, and displays all kinds of intriguing data on the city-state’s shopping complexes and culture. Its richly layered analysis perfectly matches Hong Kong’s multi-story machines for consumption.” —Clifford Pearson, director of USC American Academy in China “Stefan Al has again produced a book that provides a sharp lens on radically new urban forms that are emerging in China. While his previous books, Villages in the City andFactory Towns of South China introduced the site of production and housing for the migrant labor of the Pearl River Delta, here we enter the phantasmagoria of the enormous interconnected free-trade shopping zone of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Mall City dissects the basic unit of this climate-controlled consumer landscape—the mall. This beautifully illustrated book is a must-read for those who wish to understand the future of public space in high-density cities.” —Brian McGrath, professor of urban design and dean of constructed environments, Parsons School of Design

Christian historian Sidney Mead has observed: In America space has played the part that time has played in older cultures of the world. In Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl examines this provocative statement in conversation with what he calls the spatial character of American theology. He argues that places are always imaginatively constructed by the human beings who inhabit them. Sometimes this spatial theology works to our benefit; other times it poses spiritual risks. What happens when our banal clothing of the sacred violates our genuine need for comfort and intimacy? Or when we remember that the fleeting pleasures of a shopping trip or a Disneyland escape are designed to fill someone else's pocket rather than the spiritual emptiness in our own hearts? Pahl develops several ways to clothe the divine from within the Christian tradition. He introduces a theology of place that reveals aspects of God's character through biblical metaphors drawn from physical spaces, such as the true vine, the rock, and the living water. Accessible and thought provoking, this enlightening book provides a better grasp of our particularly American way of lending religious significance to spaces of all kinds.

Like Underhill's bestseller, Why We Buy, this is a pleasurable and informative book on how we shop that surprises and tickles. Like Bill Bryson's Walk in the Woods, which took readers up the Appalachian Trail, this book takes readers to a place they know much better: the shopping centre, the place where people meet. Nothing exemplifies shopping more than the mall or shopping centre. It is the US's gift to personal consumption and the crossroad where consumer marketing, media and street culture meet. It is where the developed world (and increasingly everyone else too) goes to acquire, eat and hang out. It is where fashion trends are made dreams are constructed, and many people find their first jobs. The Call of the Mall is about sex and buying lingerie, about why the same camel coat costs exactly twice as much in the women's department to the men's, about why all mall food is so dreadful when the commodities in the shops are so good. Why location matters so much - but more for perfumes than DIY and why malls are invariably such bad architecture. Underhill's views on the mall are sophisticated, funny, serious, and surprising.

The catalogue World of Malls is devoted to a type of building that was invented in the United States just less than sixty years ago and quickly spread throughout the world. Due to urban planning's increasing orientation toward the automobile, the mall became a substitute for lost urbanity. Yet what direction is the development of the shopping mall taking today? On the one hand, there continue to be spectacular new openings in America, Asia, the United Arab Emirates, and Europe. At the same time, however, many malls are empty, and some are being converted and repurposed. There is hardly any other building typology that is being discussed as controversially: does the shopping mall mean the death of the city, or does it stimulate its revitalization? In their essays, urban planners, economists, and architectural historians such as Anette Baldauf, Bob Bruegmann, Dietrich Erben, Richard Longstreth, Alain Thierstein, June Williamson, and Sophie Wolfrum examine the transformation processes of the shopping mall from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. (German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-4138-5) Exhibition: Architekturmuseum der TU München in der Pinakothek der Moderne, 13.7.-22.10.2016

While becoming less relevant in the United States, shopping malls are booming throughout urban Latin America. But what does this mean on the ground? Are shopping malls a sign of the region’s “coming of age”? El Mall is the first book to answer these questions and explore how malls and consumption are shaping the conversation about class and social inequality in Latin America. Through original and insightful ethnography, Dávila shows that class in the neoliberal city is increasingly defined by the shopping habits of ordinary people. Moving from the global operations of the shopping mall industry to the experience of shopping in places like Bogotá, Colombia, El Mall is an indispensable book for scholars and students interested in consumerism and neoliberal politics in Latin America and the world.

Fashion. Food Courts. Lingerie. Fire Bombing. Suicide. Free Parking. Welcome to the Mall. Why would one woman threaten to kill another for a pair of discounted shoes? Why are cross-dressers drawn to mall car parks? What do impulse buys have to do with rioting? And why are market research companies hiding the truth from us? From one of the UK s most acclaimed literary and media talents, Tales From The Mall, is a mash-up of fiction, essays and true stories, that tells the rise of the most iconic symbol of our modern age the shopping mall. From over a hundred interviews and confessions, Morrison re-tells the true-life tales of those who work, shop and even find love inside their walls. With wry wit, insight and compassion, Morrison uncovers the secrets of retail heaven and hell, to reveal how malls manipulate our emotions in cleverly calculated ways, how they are an ideal space to meet a new lover or to kill yourself and how they are taking over the world. A startling window on our time, to make you think, fear and laugh. Retail will never be therapy again.