Publisher: Hatje Cantz Editor: Andres Lepik, Vera Simone Bader ISBN: 9783775741392 Format: Hardcover, 272pp, 225x195mm
A changing vision of shopping: a contemporary publication on the phenomenon of the shopping mall. The book 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 continues 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 prompts so much controversy: does the shopping mall mean the death of the city, or does it stimulate its revitalisation? In their essays, urban planners, economists, and architectural historians such as Anette Baldauf, Bob Bruegmann, Anna Klingmann and Dietrich Erben examine the transformation of the shopping mall from the twentieth to the twenty-first century.