In the last decades, the obsolescence of major equipment (oldest bullrings, railway stations, military facilities, old hospitals, unused factories, etc.) and the existence of urban voids in most European cities (generally old peripheral areas which have transformed into interstitial areas without a particular use) has created exceptional conditions for the emergence of a new urban typologies in central cities, namely retail areas, usually known as Urban Shopping Centres. At the same time, the phenomenon of urban shopping centres in city centres has been followed by an increasingly rich and intense debate throughout the academia. In this context, a controversial issue remains unclear: are these artefacts generating new collective spaces capable of creating synergies with public space? Or, on the contrary, will they introduce ruptures and compete with public space? This article tries to address this contentious issue arguing that in the observation of certain circumstances the urban shopping centre is in fact a powerful artefact capable of creating important collective spaces.
Bento et al. (Tue,) studied this question.