Mall City: Hong Kong’s Dreamworlds of Consumption
Edited by Stefan Al
With more shopping malls per square kilometre than any other place on Earth, there’s no better place to research the use of retail space than Hong Kong. This was the first book I bought from the Hong Kong University Press when I was captivated by the clarity of the blow-up diagrams and colourful graphics on the pages.
From Victor Gruen’s world’s first shopping mall – Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota – shopping malls have evolved fringe being covered streets in the US to vertical towers of retail space in Hong Kong. The many short texts on topics such as the evolution of the shopping mall in Hong Kong and the battle against blank wall spaces to make streets interesting again explain why malls are the way the are in the city with precious few private spaces.
The good, the bad, and the ugly of shopping mall designs are revealed with studies to show how the present order of consumption could be improved. It provides important insight on how the urban population may be interacting with their space when the world population balloons to eleven digits in the coming decade.
