Collectivity and the Post-war European Shopping Centre

Abstract

This paper puts forth the hypothesis that notions such as ‘collectivity’, ‘play’ and ‘community’ – buzz words of the post-war discourse on architecture and urbanism – were often important elements in the design and conceptualization of post-war shopping centres in Western Europe. To investigate this hypothesis, the paper focuses on three typologically distinct shopping centres that were developed in Belgium between 1968 and 1977 – scrutinizing their design and pairing and comparing their spatial characteristics, and the idea(l)s that underpinned them, with those of other (well-known) buildings and urban models of the period.