S(m)all Inversion: Playing on the edge of the in Auckland Downtown Shopping Centre

Abstract

As the act of purchasing surpasses most activities in both number and breadth in our lives, retail spaces are often thought of as civic destinations for everyday practice. In our society, shopping is one of the most crucial social interactions. It is an experience of social networking because it is usually what we do when we “go out”, it is how we satisfy our need to socialise – to feel we are part of public life. We evidently like going to shopping to discover, experience, or because of the social contact with the community. Shopping can be experienced as an event rather than just a practice of purchasing. Consumption provides a social bridge between the communal and the individual. This thesis proposes to regenerate Downtown Shopping Centre in Auckland CBD. Next to the Britomart central transportation hub, along a key pedestrian axis, with the planned inner City Rail Link, the urban implications of this site are vast. The current status of the shopping centre is under-performing, blocked up by large billboards on the outside, with a conventional interior, large spaces given to be public are not functioning at all, such as the underpopulated Queen Elizabeth Square. The shopping mall has now become a sales machine of profit and commodification which has lost the environmental- and people-orientated values that Victor Gruen, the first architect to build the shopping mall, wanted to convey. How can we regenerate a mall as an incubator for social and civic life so that it creates a revitalising atmosphere? The new typology of the mall will consist of “event” spaces for shopping and other activities which are beyond the banality of typical retailers and reconcile social groups such as locals and tourists, merging community life and creating a new space of consumption being “inverted”. S(m)all Inversion is the idea of reciprocating a larger entity (a mall) into smaller components (a series of shops), constituting a village inside a building, where retailers are contained inside an envelope, blurring one’s perception of inside and outside, and fundamentally changing one’s experience of shopping and everyday life.