| Summary: | The objective of this research is the formation of a critical position by which the repositioning of the British shopping mall from a suburban to an urban situation can be understood. Widely discredited as the ‘slayer’ of the high street, the suburban shopping mall has been cast aside as western development ideals shift toward a new so-called ‘urban renaissance’. Accordingly, many architects have focused their interest on Far Eastern models of urban complexity drawn from the unprecedented urban expansion taking place in countries such as China, Singapore and Japan. There, the shopping mall has become a cornerstone of a new urbanity, representing a typological leap from the historic suburban models of mall design established in much of the Western world. Using Westfield in White City, the Westfield development at the 2012 Olympic site, the Liverpool One shopping centre and the redeveloped Bull Ring in Birmingham as UK case studies, I will draw attention to how the typology is evolving as a culturally hybrid proposition borne of insights drawn from its Eastern counterparts. Can this blurring of cultural lines unravel the layers of existential meaning embodied within the modern British mall to provide a different kind of language with which designers may engage with this building type? Timely questions such as this must be addressed as the ‘second coming’ of the shopping mall, re-branded under the banner of ‘urban regeneration’, increasingly defines what happens in the centre of British cities today.
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