Social Spatialization and the Built Environment
The West Edmonton Mall
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4476471 |
|---|---|
| Authors | R Shields (0000-0002-7999-1833, Urban and Regional Studies, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton BN1 9QN, England, corresponding author) |
| Year | 1989 |
| Volume | 7 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 147-164 |
| Publication date | 1989-06-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Environment and Planning D Society and Space (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0263-7758 • E-ISSN: 1472-3433 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1068/d070147 |
| OpenAlex | W2044225432 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 106 |
| References cited | 24 |
The West Edmonton Mall, situated on the northwestern extremities of the Canadian Prairies, and the largest shopping-leisure complex at the time of writing, draws shoppers from all over North America and even Japan. As a privatized public space which diverts consumers from other urban areas it has occasioned much civic boosterism. It presents a fascinating set of interventions in the local social spatialization of a regional capital on the North American cultural periphery. The Mall both imposes and implies changes in the spatial patterns of everyday life, in the imaginary geography of sites of consumption in North America, and in conceptions of the world as a space of distance and difference. To draw on Lefebvre, the creation of such a space in the built environment, called a hyperspace by some, amounts both to a new representation of the spatial and to a 'space of representation'. Building upon the work of Benjamin and Bakhtin, an analysis of liminality and carnival in the Mall's reunion of the rational and the ludic provides a critical perspective from which to evaluate recent work by Gottdiener on shopping malls. This leads to a view which pays close attention to users' resistance to the above suggestions through refunctioning and 'hijacking' the mall space for their own purposes
Advertising · Archaeology · Architectural engineering · Business · Capital (architecture · Civil engineering · Consumption (sociology · Everyday life · Gentrification · Geography · Liminality · Media studies · Political science · Public space · Representation (politics · Shopping mall · Situated · Social science · Social space · Sociology · Spatialization · The Imaginary · Anthropology · Computer Science · Engineering · Literature, Culture, and Criticism · Psychology · Spatial and Cultural Studies · Urban and sociocultural dynamics
The Restless Urban Landscape
The Transformation of Cultural Geography
Economic Geographies
Participation in alternative retail channels
Consumactor
Acquiring goods and services in lower income populations
Innovation in the experience economy
Modes of goods acquisition in deprived neighbourhoods
Les limites épistémologiques des représentations sociospatiales des pratiques urbaines juvéniles
Consumer Culture and Postmodernism
On the Contours of Public Space
When perception is reality
Surveillance and exclusion practices in the governance of access to shopping centres on periphery estates in the UK
From The waste land to Past‐present fuchsia
Welcome to Bogan-ville
Taking people for a ride
Sign Consumption in the 19th-Century Department Store
Creating a scene
Creating Space, Creating Self
The curious case of atrium urbanism
Moral panics and urban renaissance
This Is Religious Environment”
Geographical Practice and Postmodern Destination Image
The Trope of the Organic City
The Spatial–Experiential Archetype of the “Quad”
What Happens [in Vegas]”
Farmers’ markets in Prague
Disneyfication of the Metropolis
From Tiger Balm Gardens to Dragon World
Reconciling economic and cultural explanations for participation in alternative consumption spaces
Lobster is big in Boston
Geographies of public space
And now it's all consumption
Science fiction or future fact? Exploring imaginative geographies of the new millennium
Popular Cultural Practices in the “Postmodern City”
Video Surveillance, Gender, and the Safety of Public Urban Space
Retail and the Urban
Homeless Women in Public Spaces
The meaning of alternative consumption practices
Cities
The self, signification and the superyacht
(Other) bodies and tourism studies
Explaining informal and second‐hand goods acquisition
Looking Forward by Looking Back
Urban Design and City Regeneration
USA's Destiny? Regulating Space and Creating Community in American Shopping Malls
Britain's Regional Shopping Centres
Culinary Deserts, Gastronomic Oases
Domestication by Cappuccino or a Revenge on Urban Space? Control and Empowerment in the Management of Public Spaces
Why Do People Use Alternative Retail Channels? Some Case-study Evidence from Two English Cities
The Formation of Identity in Teenage Mall Microculture
A monument to whom? Artist positionality in community art-based projects
Fashioning the city
The social milieux of two North London shopping centres
West Edmonton Mall as a Centre for Social Interaction
West Edmonton Mall
Marking time
The “Magic of the Mall”
The Urban Exploration Imaginary
The World Was Getting Smaller
The ‘magic of the mall’ revisited
Airports, mobility and the calculative architecture of affective control
Ambient Power
Tales of the Unexpected
More on ‘big things
The gaze without eyes
Spaces of Informalisation
The City Unbound
Authenticity in tourism
Campos de disputa e gestão do espaço urbano
Urban Lifestyles
Subtopia in Gateshead
Shopping Malls, Consumer Culture and the Reshaping of Public Space in Egypt
The 'Other' Postmodern Tourism
Driving Places
In Pursuit of the Postmodern
The Challenge of Post-Modern Scholarship Within Geography
Spatial Govemmentality and the New Urban Social Order
Where the Knots of Narrative Are Tied and Untied
Circuits of tourism
Heritage spectacles
Consumerism, disorientation and postmodern space
A Place for Experience
Secondhandedness
Experiencing Visualities in Designed Urban Environments
La ville et le « spectacle
A Truant Proximity
The Incredible Shrinking World? Technology and the Production of Space
The Bargain, the Knowledge, and the Spectacle
Public Relations, Private Security
My Friends in Low Places
Tourism, Capital, and Place
Landscape and Surplus Value
Glorified Fantasies and Masterpieces of Deception on Importing Las Vegas into the 'New South Africa
"Where do all the lovers go?" - The Cultural Politics of Public Kissing in Mumbai, India (1950-2005)
The assemblages of (counter) spectacle - mega-retail in post-dictatorship Chile and beyond
Watching the City
Discourse, Displacement, and Retail Practice
Dreams so Big Only the Sea Can Hold Them
Discourses of Locality
Right and Left
Just looking
The Social Production of Urban Space
The Difference that Space Makes
The end of organized capitalism
Distinction
Introduction
Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique
Experiments in Postmodern Dialogue
The birth of the clinic
Practical Social Science
The Socio-Spatial Dialectic
Flexible Accumulation Through Urbanization
Postmodernism and the Politics of Social Theory
Shopping Centre Development
Postmodernism and Planning
Primitive Classification (Routledge Revivals)
Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors
Cultural Change and Contemporary Holiday-Making
Modernization, Globalization and the Problem of Culture in World-Systems Theory
A metatheoretical critique of Immanuel Wallerstein's the modern world system
| Unique citing works | 106 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 2,79 |
| Citation span | 1988 - 2025 (38) |
| Citation velocity | recent |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 105 |