Author(s): Nan Liang & Ana Morcillo Pallares
Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity.”1 Rem Koolhaas stated twenty years ago. Through increasingly predatory forms, shopping has infiltrated and colonized urban life. From the explosion of suburban shopping centers in the mid-20th century to today’s specialized big-box stores with highly computerized goods-tracking systems, this paper calls for a reformulation of alternative models of retailing. One that engages the community and challenges citizens’ demands. How to fight back unsustainable urban retail models and have the shopping center be a balanced urban ecosystem becomes a crucial question to answer now. From this approach, the research discusses a comparison between two examples: Downtown Charlottesville in Virginia by Anna and Lawrence Halprin (1976) and the Chengdu Sino-OceanTaikoo Li by Oval Partnership (2014). Although these two projects are nearly four decades apart and have very different socio-cultural and political backgrounds, both align the formula of the shopping street as an antidote to the current unsustainable urban mechanisms that perpetuate inequality.
Volume Editors
Rico Quirindongo & Georgeen Theodore
ISBN
978-1-944214-39-5