New recombinant factors emerging in urban public space counteract the increasing disjunction of urban places subject to commodification and privatisation. In low-density cities within neoliberal political frameworks, these factors have developed peculiar places of social relationship: the integrated urban enclosures devoted to lifestyle consumption that are the latest evolution of shopping centres. These enclosures are heterotopic places mobilised by spectacle that quickly subsume the fundamental changes occurring in the relations between architecture and associative life in our contemporary post-consumerist, digital era. The paper discusses a comparative analysis of the new mall typology recently introduced into Auckland, exploring the important challenge they pose to architecture and urban design in defining the future of public space.
This article discusses the theoretical framework and methodology developed for research on comparative urbanism devoted to emerging phenomena in rapidly expanding cities. It focuses on problems related to the right to the city, particularly addressing questions of participation in the production of space. The exploration of progressive social and spatial fragmentation of urban environments concentrates on the peculiar changes occurring in the main nodes of Auckland, the largest polycentric urban area of New Zealand. Primary places of this urban transformation are the shopping malls of latest generation that dominate the newly formed metropolitan centres. The presented methodology aims to interpret the heterotopic spatial introversions of these centres and describe their specific forms of spatial transductions. Its specific analytical methods are designed to provide indications of the emerging transformation of the role of public space in the interpersonal sphere of sociability. This involves the exploration of the agency of new digital media as instruments for the emergence of independent and autonomous recombinant forms in the new urban condition. The methods are combined to analyse and compare conceptions and experiences of physical, social and eidetic spatialities. Their application is expected to provide empirical support to the theoretically hypothesised, strong correlation between the increasing dis-embedding strength of territorial infrastructure and the emergence of networked "representational" recombinations occurring with the latest "malling" form.
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