Abstract
Nowadays, public centres are progressively supplanted by urban commercial centres through simulating their sociospatial role. What are the mechanisms supporting this simulation? Is this transition also offering opportunities for sustainable urbanity? This paper aims to answer these questions by discussing the sociospatial wellbeing of the novel malls in the mobile internet era, focusing on their artful configuration and perceptual disposition. It explores the capacity of these malls to transpose urban centralities from the open public sphere to the segregated private realm through an exemplary case study, a novel mall in a major Chinese city. Findings indicate a crucial spatial ambivalence that we conceptualise by articulating two Foucauldian heterotopic principles: ambivalent inclusivity (the fifth) and compensatory relationality (the sixth). The former segregate people in labyrinthine-detoured pathways while providing outstanding urban connectivity. The latter lures people into realms of pseudo-communities while fostering the social interactions among the progressively digitally networked public.
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Notes
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An online software based on Wechat, a popular communication application in China.
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This research acknowledges the financial support from the China Scholarship Council (Grant No. 202106130013).
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Ou, Y., Manfredini, M., Gao, G., Sun, R., Su, Q. (2023). Sociospatial Wellbeing in Urban Commercial Centres: An Analysis of Abstraction and Relationality of Novel Mall Spatialities in the Mobile Internet Era. In: Swasto, D.F., Rahmi, D.H., Rahmawati, Y., Hidayati, I., Al-Faraby, J., Widita, A. (eds) Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Indonesian Architecture and Planning (ICIAP 2022). ICIAP 2022. Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering, vol 334. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1403-6_37
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