urban culture in 'going full circle' shock

"Iain Sinclair! Guy Debord! Marshall Berman! Walter Benjamin! Your boys took one hell of a beating"

News reaches me of plans for the next Westfield shopping mall, which will be bigger than the biggest shopping mall in Europe, a title currently held by the Shepherds Bush Westfield shopping mall. And yet the new one, in Stratford East London, comes with a twist:

10 per cent of the units will be reserved for smaller, “cutting edge” independent retailers of the sort found in Spitalfields, Shoreditch and Hoxton. “We want to harness that edgy, eclectic east London feel,” [the marketing manager] said. There will also be for the first time in a shopping mall in Britain a permanent art gallery and Westfield is recruiting figures in the art world including Tracey Emin to act as advisers on a “cultural committee”. Unlike the sleek marbled floored lines of Westfield London, parts of the new mall will be given an “industrial” finish to give it the feel of the “loft quarter” of east London.

What to say? Where to start? The first shopping mall with a permanent art gallery? (Cultural sociologists scurry away in search of that little-known retail phenomenon, the temporary mall-based art gallery). Malls are endlessly fascinating phenomena, inspiring copious volumes of post-modern theorising. I previously marvelled at Westfield's capacity to exaggerate its true surrealism. I later plucked up the courage to attempt my own piece of psychogeography in the mall itself, an experience that left me confused and disorientated. What now?

The first thing to say is that they have, in many respects, got this one spot on. Spitalfields is already a mall, containing a massive glass RBS monstrosity at one end, Giraffe and Carluccios restaurants in the middle, and then a play area for stall-holders at the other end. Fair enough. Westfield Stratford is a mall inspired by another mall. It might have been more ironic to base it on Westfield's own Shepherds Bush achievement, but even post-modern humour requires some sort of external referent. 

Then what about those 10% of units for small independent retailers? How will the occupants be found? Perhaps there is an untapped community of bohemian cultural entrepreneurs scattered around Whitechapel, who dream of one day draping antique suits and second hand books across the window of their own glass box, while sandwiched between Dixons and Nandos.

Lets not get too distracted by any 'authentic/inauthentic' distinction here. The people most likely to be offended by such flagrant pastiching of East London are the tourists and arts students who happily gobble up its pastiches unknowingly. Stratford is, in any case, nowhere near Shoreditch, and the mall is far more likely to be culturally and psychologically associated with the Olympics site. 

But what is interesting, I invite any mall-watchers to consider, is that this must surely be the first mall to create a pastiche of anti-corporate urbanism. The malls that first fascinated the sociologists of post-modernity typically turned themselves into a combination of churches, themeparks, jungles and wombs. They opted for fantastical mega-surrealism, in an effort to unleash unconscious desires in the sanctity of privatised, securitised and sanitised retail spaces. They were a cultural rejection of urban public space, in addition to being a genuine departure from it. 

Then there were the malls which offered a pastiche of small-town public space, nurturing an associated feeling of community and homogeneity (while still ensuring that no space was truly public). Californian 'towns' have been built, not so different from Poundbury, in which a conservative ideal is developed into a shopping idyl, olde worlde yet with still recognisable brands. In contrast to the hysterical face of postmodernism, this - as celebrated by Prince Charles - is its conservative cousin, with a famously light-fingered approach to history.

What Westfield appear to be suggesting, however, is a mall modelled on what was originally its antithesis: the messy, racially mixed, polluted, dangerous city street, where retailers have no known reputations, or at least not to the nervous new-comer. Of course, this street scarcely exists any longer in Shoreditch. Ironically, it's far more likely to exist in Stratford and its environs - which is the whole reason why a mall is necessary in the first place, to provide car-owners and Olympics fans with a safe, sanitised place to part with their cash. 

This represents a bizarre new phase of gentrification, in which the inner city reaches a stage of such security and prosperity that it can be picked up, packaged and dumped in the suburbs in an effort to revitalise and excite them. A reversal, no less, of the initial attempts to lure people into new residential urban developments in areas such as Limehouse through the promise of green space and off-street parking.

It'll be fascinating to see how far they take it: will begging be allowed, if done in an attractive enough fashion? Will there be Jane Jacobs-style 'public characters' (perhaps doubling up as security guards) to distribute reputation about 'this fabulous little bagel place down there on the right next to the Adidas Store'? And is Tracey Emin really going to go anywhere near this place with a ten foot messed-up duvet cover? All will be revealed.

After that, I propose doing an even bigger one closely modelled on Stoke Newington. And just to put the final nail in the coffin of urban meta-self-referentiality po-mo, I have the perfect location for it: Stoke Newington.

Comments

[Lucy]

Interesting stuff. Loft living is not going to be a common feature of stratford anyway with the newbuild flats around the park. I can't imagine an edgy mall!

[Bridget]

It's so true, and not just of shopping malls - our world is now hyper-real. It won't be long until someone builds Brent Cross Land, an "authentic shopping mall experience", harking back to the good old days of the birth of the consumerist dream.

I was meaning to de-lurk in response to your last post, I used to come to your pub quiz back when I lived along the road. I miss Dalston, and the Scolt Head was a good pub. Hope it's a successful night!

[Lucy Johnson]

Hallo Will-tis your ex student- I read your comments today in the guardian and thought I'd have a little peruse of your blog! As I live in Spitalfields I found it interesting and thought provoking though I am not sure that I am of accord with everything that you say...

[max]

I feel partly responsible for this - I did some urbanist consulting for Westfield a year or so ago and vaguely remember us recommending some of these ideas in a moment of desperation. We'd just discovered that the site would be separated from Stratford town centre by a quasi-medieval moat - a gigantic architectural Freudian slip, I suspect.

The anti-mall design creates an ersatz town centre next to the real one. The problem is that the design sends out all the cues of public space, but is actually private space (with security guards acting like police - but not actually police).

I worry that Westfield will try to manage out all the liveliness, mess, mix and edge of a real town centre - along with sections of the local community. Anna Minton's book Ground Control has some excellent examples of this - including mall managers describing how they 'inject vitality' at regular intervals.

It'll be interesting to see if the developers accept the logic of what they're building and manage it accordingly - if it looks like a city street, people will use it that way. Let's hope putting Tracey Emin in charge of culture is a small step in the right direction ...

[Will Davies]

I love the idea of 'injecting vitality'. It sounds reminiscent of how nightclubs have had to 'inject smell' to make up for the lack of cigarette smoke, that traditionally hid the smell of stale beer and ravers' farts.

How long can it be before a certain multi-millionaire anonymous grafiti stencil-artist gets in on the act? I picture him, becowled, alongside Beckham and Seb Coe at the 2012 opening ceremony...

[Graham Jeffery]

Absolutely bang on. It's an enormous parody of gentrification, eating itself. Extraordinary, yet, as you say, just taking the logic of the spectacle to the next level... I'm pretty certain that the rent levels will exclude any genuinely 'independent' businesses though - the real question is what will become of the original stratford town centre in the face of this? Perhaps just a giant car park cum poundstore? Strange days.

[Graham Jeffery]

Another thought, I suppose, is that one can't really describe Stratford as 'the suburbs' - yet. One of the narratives about Newham is that for the last thrity years at least it's been a borough with inner-city characteristics, but on the cusp of inner/outer London. A liminal space in many ways and somewhere where lots of possible urban futures were/are being envisaged and tested out. But perhaps all of this development marks a phase in the suburbanization of Newham - making it more acceptable and palatable as a 'destination'. I dunno - I fled from Newham in the face of 2012 and all that, having poured much energy and effort into the place, a few years ago, but my sense is that this marks a transformation on even bigger a scale than the Canary Wharf estate's insertion into the Isle of Dogs, with all the attendant contradictions and fissures. Post 2012 though, it's not immediately obvious where all the money will come from to keep the megamall going.