AHO WORKS STUDIES 2012-2013
Architectural Studies
Retail and the Revival of the Central City
It may also—at the same time—be a result of
governmental or public media pressure to en-
sure the unhindered public use and accesses
to the urban spaces of the centre. Regardless
of the underlying reason, Liverpool One repre-
sents a new hybrid form of the historic public
urban space and the controlled and privatized
environment of the shopping centre. Centres
profit from being perceived as ‘public’ spaces
whereby they attract a wide range of visitors.
This extends to providing amenities not found
elsewhere in the urban realm—like benches,
toilets or breast-feeding facilities—which
indicates the positive role shopping centres
can have in creating attractive and vital urban
spaces for wide ranges of society.
A new shopping centre debate
Integrated shopping centres may transform
both use and perception of the central urban
areas that often form the focus for commu-
nal or civic identity in towns and cities. The
critical question is to what degree the deci-
sion of where to locate and how to design new
commercial districts should be left to private
interests, and whether and how democratic
processes and public institutions should take
an active, and informed role in these decisions.
‘De-mallifying’ old structures and propos-
ing new retail schemes that do not follow the
old shopping centre format, can bee seen as
attempts by the private developers to dissoci-
ate the infrastructural and business model of
the shopping centre from its negative image. In
some cases it is a means by which developers
seek political and public approval of large city
centre schemes, and may even be a result of
clever attempts by the retail industry to pro-
duce shopping centres that attract costumers
that do not like shopping centres (Mathallen in
Oslo comes to mind). But the resulting urban
spaces often has a public character that dis-
tinguishes them from the traditional shopping
centre model, opening up for the possibility
for new uses of central urban spaces, and po-
tentially new futures for town centres as high
quality architectural spaces for everyday life.
A letter to a newspaper recently called for “a
new shopping centre debate”
1
where shopping
centres are related to the (re)generation of city
centres, and the urban architectural quality of
emerging centres are put to the fore. The chang-
ing conditions under which shopping centres
are now being constructed provides an oppor-
tunity to rethink or reformulate relationships
between retail and city centres: “shopping can
contribute to attractiveness of cities”
2
. In order
to do so, current positive and negative percep-
tions of shopping centres has to be re-exam-
ined. Research reveals that ‘the devil is in the
detail’: New programmatic combinations of re-
tail, housing and cultural programs may be well
and good, but close attention to howmovement
and visual interaction takes place is critical in
unlocking the potential for urban vitality found
in these novel urban environments.
It is vital that planners and municipalities are
qualified to evaluate the proposals for city cen-
tre urban realm projects put forward by inves-
tors, but also that they learn to understand the
motives and logics of the retail industry to be
able to formulate clear, strategic and longsight-
ed demands to the developers in negotiations
and planning processes. Access to the public ur-
ban realm is commercially valuable, and should
only be allowed if greater benefits for a wide
range of the population can be expected.
(The text is a product of the studio course Urban Design
– The New City Centre)
1 ‘Kjøpesenterlandet’, Dagens Næringsliv, 19 March, 2012,
by Morten Ednes from The Foundation for
Design and Architecture in Norway.
2 Terje Kaldager, The Norwegian Ministry of the Environmen
t.
