largest mall in the Iberian Peninsula, houses 420 stores and more than 60 restaurants, as well as plenty of entertainment options, such as an indoor amusement park with roller coaster, and 10-screen movie theatre, health club and bowling alley). It is difficult to work on a classification on shopping malls though, based on square metre surface, because developers regularly open building sites for the construction of a new and larger shopping mall elsewhere in the suburb as well as in central districts. The architecture of consumption, and in particular the architecture of shopping, follows the logic of the Next Big Thing, namely a recurring promise of a new typology that will deliver greater profits and higher consumer satisfaction (Herman, 2001). The principle of newness is the engine of the market system, so that enduring shopping buildings, department stores, big boxes and malls need to be constantly updated through renovation and expansion while reflecting increasingly refined consumer profiles. Now malls are conceived to accommodate not only an impressive number of shops and restaurants but also plenty of entertainment options to hold people on site long after shopping.
Historical settings: looking for the mall? While shopping malls - accommodated in a safe, clean and controlled typology, more or less complex – served for many years as the hub of public life in the dispersal city of suburbia, historic centers, all over Europe and Italy, throughout the 1960s and the 1970s started to change their accessibility: the drive for pedestrianisation banned automobiles from significant portions of central areas with the intention to enhance public life and allowed a safe and more pleasant browsing pace for shoppers. Public administrators realised that cars in the city centre were like cars inside a painting of the Medieval or Renaissance period, thus restricting urban potential and general consumption. This action allowed commercial activities to flourish. In Italy many city centres, especially in Rome, Florence and Venice, as final destinations of worldwide tourism, progressively no longer supported everyday residents’ activities, but en-plein-air shopping malls where monuments are standing as historical anchors. Milan, as Italy’s fashion capital, is the country’s biggest shopping centre. Many outlets are located in Milan and the surrounding area where Italian labels and famous brands discount their goods by as much as 50%. This process generated a progressive loss of urbanity, seriously impacting on residents’ activities and daily uses. The social significance of public space as a meeting place for people started a still ongoing transition into a place of commerce and consumption, where locals and tourists mixed while replacing neighbourhood services with attractive and luxury chain shops. As a result, many historic residents have moved to suburban neighbourhoods or far away in the metropolitan area, looking for better housing conditions including facilities and daily costs, freely accessible parking areas and green amenities. At the same time, paradoxically, remaining historic residents accustomed to the move to suburban malls, where different choices of public life, vibrant hypermarket services and flagship stores are available. While urban retailers and governments, following a commercial strategy, started to convert historic streets into shopping centres, acquiring characteristics of suburban malls, suburbs have begun to resemble cities with townscape malls. In our contemporary society, shopping has become the basic glue of every urban experience in search of a sense of community.
Further development This paper aims to establish a theoretical background of the Italian situation related to the fragmentation of the suburban territory and the importance of shopping malls as places for services and public life. It is intended to be a general overview of broader research based on the investigation of suburban everyday life in order to unveil a complex urbanity, based on ever-changing and unpredictable factors. The research assumption is that suburban public life can be discovered in different functions, places and practices, not necessarily in a morphologically designed space, facilitated by accessibility provided by
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