Ways of Living in the Market City - Global Rome: Changing Faces of the Eternal City - page 126

“centrality” in its entirety, rather than merely on the shopping center and its in-
ternal life.2
Centralities and Nonplaces: approaching the shopping Centers from
within the Roman Context
urban development related to the construction of shopping centers took place
in Rome (and in italy in general) much later than elsewhere—especially brit-
ain and the united states, where the phenomenon spread many years ago and
is now a very typical characteristic of the urban landscape, giving rise to sub-
sequent generations of malls. in italy, mainly up to the late 1980s, there was a
certain resistance to grand projects of this kind because they were at variance
both with the traditional models of shopping that were more inclined toward
small- and medium-sized local shops and because of conservative policies of an
administrative bureaucracy that certainly did not favor them. Thus, while these
large business centers were becoming widespread in other european countries
(france, Germany, and so on), their presence in italy was very limited until the
early 1990s, when a certain amount of liberalization and the initiative of some
entrepreneurs brought about their development in Rome. since then, they gradu-
ally found favor in the market and have seen a growing interest on the part of
consumers in an urban development model that was strongly orientated toward
and conditioned by consumption.
in this respect, italy seems to have partially assimilated well-established and
standardized foreign models, uncritically and tardily. writings in italy on this
subject are relatively thin on the ground and focus mainly on the critique of the
“shop window city” (amendola 2006) and of the shopping center as a consumer-
ist and standardized model. There are far more studies in other countries, es-
pecially britain and the united states, that focus on the characteristics and the
effects of the phenomenon.3 much high-level work has taken the shopping mall
as a symbolic reference point of a model of urban development which signals a
change in the history of cities. as is well known, marc augé (1992) regards the
shopping center, along with airports, railway stations, and other spaces that are
so widespread and so typical of our urban existence, as a “nonplace” par excel-
lence. lewis mumford (1938, 1961) repeatedly returns to this issue and the model
of urban development connected to it, based on the exponential growth of travel
by private car. This, he says, has turned the city into a kingdom ruled by the car: a
distorted interpretation of “progress,” for the most part expressed in a predomi-
nant obsession with the car that goes beyond true human needs; a false inter-
pretation of modernity, reduced to “modernization,” the victim of the “religion
of motoring.” lefebvre (1968), in light of the urban growth in europe that was
already in evidence in the 1960s, refers to shopping centers as a model of urban
development and a strategy of the ruling classes, based on the logic of “planned
consumption.”