Acculturating the Shopping Centre

Acculturating the Shopping Centre examines whether the shopping centre should be qualified as a global architectural type that effortlessly moves across national and cultural borders in the slipstream of neo-liberal globalization, or should instead be understood as a geographically and temporally bound expression of negotiations between mall developers (representatives of a global logic of capitalist accumulation) on the one hand, and local actors (architects/governments/citizens) on the other. In exploring how the shopping centre adapts to different cultural contexts, this publication highlights the importance of the shopping centre as an urban figure of collectivity that has the capacity to disrupt and even amend the conditions that it encounters.