| Title |
A Spatial Analysis of Shopping Mall Design in the North American Urban Context |
| Abstract |
The North American shopping mall developed in the late 1950s had anti-urban characteristics from the beginning. Being surrounded by acres of surface car parks, it creates discontinuity between internal spaces and streets. The major questions of this paper are to examine the spatial morphology of the shopping mall; and to seek an alternative for the present stereotype suburban mall. Space syntax is used as a descriptive and analytical method. The paper is three-fold: first, it compares the space patterns of suburban and urban mall on the basis of several malls chosen as case studies. Second, the paper closely investigates the correlation between spatial and pedestrian movement.Here, on-site observations of shoppers' movement are conducted. Finally, the paper explores the potential for continuity of pedestrian access form a building complex to urban fabric and suggests that the shoppong mall can and should be a continuum of the public domain |