(2009-07-13) Heathcote Urban Retail

Edwin Heathcote on the Urban Design conversion of Public Space into Experience Economy Private Space. Beneath the pavements of Cardinal Place in London's Victoria, an open-air shopping mall contained in a swooshy envelope of steel and glass, there is no beach. Just the District Line. I was wandering around it the other day and, when I tried to take a photo, was stopped by a security guard, who told me it was forbidden; this was private space, even though it appeared to be much like any other streetscape. Cardinal Place, like dozens of other malls without walls across the US and Britain, is a prime example of a new kind of pseudo-public space - one which attempts to communicate the openness and civility of the public realm but which, when its surface is scratched, reveals itself to be obsessively, fearsomely private... The city has become a visually-branded backdrop to retail in which life is not lived but product is consumed.

The only way these big developments have been able to get planning permission is for a local authority to parcel together a big tract of land (usually formerly industrial or railway land, often formerly publicly owned) and to give over the whole thing to a developer who is charged with driving the "regeneration" that the public sector has largely lost the ability to conceive. Consequently, rather than the network of public streets interspersed with public spaces, private blocks and semi-private but accessible courtyards that forms the fabric of the traditionally complex city centre, we get the pseudo-civic space of the Shopping Mall without walls. Protest in these spaces is banned, as is public gathering, distribution of leaflets, drinking, sleeping and, of course, photography. Yet there has been no outcry... I have even been asked to stop taking notes.

What Guy Debord was calling for was a city in which what was important was not the way it looked or how many new shops it had but the multiplicity of ways in which it could be used. His way of subverting the structure of a Paris that had been conceived by Baron Haussmann, with wide avenues to enable an army swiftly to quell a revolution, was to walk across it on an aimless walk - the famous derive - in which the flaneur concentrates on the mundane and the banal and does not allow his gaze to be directed to the formal or the ceremonial.

The Guatamalan architect Teddy Cruz, who works in the strange hinterlands between the wealth of San Diego and the poverty of Tijuana just across the border in Mexico, has called for a new system of measuring the success of a city - one based not on density of population or on the value of turnover and rent but on the frequency of social transactions.

We all look to the extraordinary mix of life in a Mediterranean piazza but when we build new chunks of city we make them part of the carefully structured "experience economy" rather than real, chaotic, unpredictable urban spaces. The centres of our cities, from Times Square to Potsdamer Platz via Cardinal Place, have become urban simulacra. The irony is that what Debord referred to as a process of "the decline of being into having, and having into merely appearing" has culminated in a city of Spectacle in which it is, ironically, forbidden to spectate or to capture the appearance of vibrancy on a camera other than CCTV.