Scholarly record

COHERENCE OF SHOPPING CENTERES WITH THE CITY SPACE

Dariusz Dziubinski

Abstract

The nature of shopping centers, their impact on the city, space and residents is the target of critics of sociologists, ethnographers (anthropologists), as well as urban planners and architects, in which they were classified as non-places – deprived of history, spaces of alienation, loneliness, lack of social relations. Wroc?aw is a city where the ratio of space in shopping centers per capita is one of the highest (if not the highest) in Europe. Constructed in various periods – the last one last year (2017), they remain in a different relation to the surroundings and the city. Following in the footsteps of Marc Auge, who, after Michael Certau, did not counteract the non-places with places and did not evaluate them negatively, I submit in my work an observation of selected, largest shopping centers in Wroc?aw, in search of all forms of coherence with space around and the entire city structure. The slow process of change, on the other hand, continues. Despite appearances, the shopping centers, as important players in shopping domain, play a huge role in this process. The described results of the research show the dependence between them and the spaces of the city. Their mutual relations are gradually deepening, the attraction effect works. An open question is whether the spaces around these objects – border zones, will become seams at all, connecting them closely with the city into one organism.

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