Shopping Towns Europe - by Janina Gosseye & Tom Avermaete (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Shopping Towns Europe is the first book to explore the introduction and dissemination of the shopping centre in Europe.

European shopping centres are often assumed to be no more than carbon copies of their American precursors - however the wide-ranging case studies featured in this book reveal a very different story. Drawing connections between architectural history, political economy and commerce, together these studies tell us much about the status and role of modernist design, the history of consumption, and the rapidly-changing social, urban, and national contexts of post-war Europe.

The book's 18 chapters explore case studies spanning the continent on both sides of the Iron Curtain, from Britain and The Netherlands to Sweden and the USSR. The focus is on the three decades following the first introduction of the new typology in 1945, tracing the variety of typological manifestations that occurred in widely different contexts, from Keynesianism to communism to military dictatorship. The book also explores the role of the shopping centre in urban reconstruction, and examines how new shopping centres were designed to elicit specifically modern behaviour and introduce new conceptions of collectivity into citizens' everyday lives.

Please note that due to permissions restrictions, several images which do appear in the print edition of this book do not feature in the ebook versions.

Review Quotes

[The] perspective [Shopping Towns Europe] offers is likely to prove enlightening to historians of modern architecture, of mass consumption, and most especially of Modern Europe.
EuropeNow

Shopping Towns Europe is a tour de force of pan-European research collaboration. It draws together scholarship from all over Europe to overturn the usual story of the American origins of the shopping mall, completely changing our understanding of this new urban building type.
Adrian Forty, Professor Emeritus of Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, UK

This valuable collection shows how civic and commercial agendas converged in the urban planning and architecture of new shopping centers throughout Europe in the decades after World War II. It makes a compelling case that these places helped shape a "pervasive modernity," albeit one that could not, in itself, reconcile the values of collective societies with the juggernaut of consumer culture.
Joan Ockman, Senior Distinguished Fellow at the University Pennsylvania School of Design and Visiting Professor at Cornell University School of Architecture, USA

About the Author

Tom Avermaete is Professor at ETH Zurich, where he holds the Chair of the History and Theory of Urban Design. Avermaete has a special research interest in the post-war public realm and the architecture of the city in Western and non-Western contexts. He is the author of Another Modern: The Post-War Architecture and Urbanism of Candilis-Josic-Woods (2005) and Casablanca, Chandigarh: A Report on Modernization (2014, with Maristella Casciato). Avermaete has also edited numerous books, including Acculturating the Shopping Centre(2018, with Janina Gosseye), and is a member of the editorial team of OASE Architectural Journal and the advisory board of the Architectural Theory Review, among others.

Janina Gosseye is a Senior Research Associate at ETH Zurich and an Honorary Senior Fellow of the University of Queensland School of Architecture. Her research is situated at the nexus of architectural theory, urban planning and social and political history. Gosseye has edited and authored several books, including Acculturating the Shopping Centre(2018, with Tom Avermaete) and Speaking of Buildings: Oral History in Architectural Research (2019, with Naomi Stead and Deborah van der Plaat). Her research has also been published in leading journals, including the Journal of Architecture, the Journal of Urban History and Planning Perspectives. In 2018, she was made an Honorary Member of the Australian Institute of Architects (AIA).