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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2024

Shopping Center and Shopping Mall: issues and failures of Victor Gruen’s design for the City of the Twentieth Century

Résumé

In 1978, in a speech given in London at the Third Annual European Conference of the International Council of Shopping Centers, Victor Gruen (1903-1980) rejected the authorship of these ‘single function ghettos’ that shopping centers had become. Built in large numbers in a majority of Western countries, these ‘shopping machines’ generally betrayed the ideals and principles that had inspired them, such as Gruen had originally conceived them at least. The aim of this paper is to put Victor Gruen’s thinking into context, clarifying what he meant by ‘shopping center’ and ‘shopping mall’. It also seeks to understand the nature of the difficulties Gruen encountered when he tried to transpose his ideas onto European soil, particularly in France. While Gruen’s work in the United States has already been studied in detail, his European projects remain relatively unknown, due in part to the fact that they often did not have the same outcomes as the ones built across the Atlantic. Gruen had difficulty establishing himself as prime contractor on the old continent, despite opening a new office in Vienna (Austria) in 1967. In recent years, however, research has begun to reveal his influence on certain planning choices implemented in Europe, including in France, during the 1960s-1970s. Nevertheless, a lot of further research is required to understand Gruen’s contributions at a time when Europe was embarking on the construction of the first shopping centers in the image of those built in the United States, and when new town construction programs were being launched in response to the demographic growth experienced during the boom years of the post-war period. Moreover, it is interesting to observe the discrepancy between the expectations of the clients – who solicited Gruen for his expertise on shopping centers – and what Gruen viewed as his mission: to ensure that European countries did not follow the same path as the United States, where downtowns had been ruined by the policy of promoting suburbanization and the development of shopping centers. There was a lesson to be learned from the American experience in Gruen’s view.
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Dates et versions

hal-04444395 , version 1 (07-02-2024)

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  • HAL Id : hal-04444395 , version 1

Citer

Catherine Maumi. Shopping Center and Shopping Mall: issues and failures of Victor Gruen’s design for the City of the Twentieth Century. colloque international UGI-IGU Paris 2022, Le temps des géographes, Comités national français de Géographie, Jul 2022, Paris, France. ⟨hal-04444395⟩

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