Abstract:
The recent development of society and technology has increased the networked spatialisation of daily practices in the primary urban centres. Yet, most of them are privatised spaces designed in oppositional relationship to the genuine urban public realm. This opposition originates from the logic of profit maximisation that lures customers into enclosed and controlled places of excessive consumption. These places mirror idealised city models and invert publicness by reproducing the spatial configuration and performance of their central places. In recent years, with the rapid and concurrent development of the experience economy, digital technology and mobile Internet, these places have undergone deep changes in form, structure, functional organisation, and daily practices. An ultra-modern model for the digitally savvy translocal society that strongly augments the heterotopic spatial transduction of the old malls has been produced.
This research aims to answer the question of whether the inversion between public and private spaces instituted by the modern malls has been maintained in the ultra-modern malls, and if it has, what is the contribution of new technologies to this inversion? It proposes an analysis of the specific production methods of the new malls by exploring their configurational and performative augmented heterotopic otherness. The theoretical frame of this study combines concepts on spatial alterities – namely Michel Foucault’s ‘heterotopia’, Kim Dovey’s ’inverted city’, and Guy Debord’s ‘Spectacle’ – and augmentations – Rob Kitchin’s ‘spatial transduction’, Richard Coyne’s ‘tuning of place’ and Joseph Pine and James Gilmore’s ‘experience economy’. The research is grounded by empirical studies on the configurational and performative inversions of the new type of mall. The study adopts a mixed-method comprising both qualitative and quantitative elements. The configurational analysis is conducted with the method of space syntax. The performative analysis triangulates data from field observations and geo-located, visual-based digital social media services, such as Weibo (the most popular general social media platform in China) and Tiktok (the most popular video-based social media in China). These analyses provide important evidence on the spatial inversions in ultra-modern malls.
Findings indicate that the new shopping mall type has produced a new kind of heterotopic inversion. The reflection adopts the critical approach of the Foucauldian ‘genealogical method’ to make sense of the non-linear development of the recent mall design. The evidence is used to show how the distinctive tunability of malls’ inversions that appears to positively support the re-associative forces of the ultra-modern mall is also disconnecting people and places by instituting complex transductive conditions and translocal practices that desynchronise their social relations. New technologies have greatly influenced the traditional offline shopping mall practices, making people more separated from each other in physical space while more connected with each other in the hybrid cyber-real space. The research also submits that there are three stages in the development of the ultra-modern mall type: the transduced inversion of the immutable grand spectacles, translocal inversion of the mobilised dislocated communities, and emergent inversion of the mutable illusionary themed experiences. Although the limitation of this research is that it does not provide comprehensive information to support a conclusive interpretation of the social and spatial effects of the new type of urban centre, the found evidence still informs a tentative interpretation of this novel paradigm, highlights its impact, and indicates the necessity of further studies.