Abstract
Retail space is everywhere. Over the past few decades, the nature and distribution of retail space – Sharon Zukin’s ‘landscapes of consumption’ – have experienced great change and growth. Retail space can now be found in the most everyday places: libraries, workplaces, museums and churches, and these new retail spaces are transforming cities and the public domain. In Retailising Space, urbanist Mattias Kärrholm sets out to use his study of Malmö in Sweden since the 1950s to call for a ‘re-materialization of urban studies’ (p. 135) and to investigate the ways in which the new consumer society has brought about ‘new styles of material organization’ that affect our minds, bodies and movements in urban space (p. 1). To that end, Kärrholm proposes a new framework for examining specifically architecture’s role in the ongoing production of territories within the city, looking at how ‘urban consumption is architecturally and territorially organized’ (p. 2) and the effect retailisation has on everyday life. This, he suggests, is a kind of ‘architectural territorology’ (p. 2). The book is, in his words, ‘an attempt [at] integrating the field of architectural research with urban studies’ (p. 2), and in doing so addresses gaps in both literatures that have so far failed properly to align architecture with social theory.
Key to the book’s argument is that urban spaces are territorialised through a dynamic and contested process of producing, curating, maintaining and inscribing spaces with meaning. Territories are not objects but socio-material processes of ‘spatially delimited and effective control’ in which the built environment plays a role (p. 13). Kärrholm proposes that territoriality is ‘one important way of investigating the roles of built form and material design’ (p. 17) and he draws on the work of Bruno Latour to suggest that territory be viewed as an actant, that is, something that brings about an effect, situated within a complex network of other actants (p. 13). Moreover, he argues that a distinction must be made between the territorial effect – ‘the behaviors, activities, rhythms, materialities’ occurring within a territory – and ‘the instincts, intentions or strategies’ behind the creation. Understanding the socio-material power relations of everyday life, then, is about looking at the former: the ways that ‘territorial effects are produced, reproduced and kept alive’ and this question comes before any question of the strategy behind that territory (p. 14).
Kärrholm suggests a typology of four modes of territorial production: strategies, tactics, associations and appropriations. Strategies and tactics are both ‘intentional attempts to mark or delimit a territory’ (p. 15); strategies are a form of impersonal, planned production from afar and tactics are personal (individual or group) claims of some form on the territory, such as marking a table at a library. Territorial associations and appropriations are not planned or intentional but a result of regular practice in a particular territory. Associations – such as a bathing place or a gravel path for playing games – are made through use but not with the intention of forming a territory or claiming exclusive rights. Territorial appropriations, however, are perceived as belonging to the individual or group undertaking ‘repetitive and consistent use of an area’ (p. 16), such as the use of a regular table at an eatery. Kärrholm’s intention is to demonstrate how territories themselves have many layers, suggesting a certain territorial complexity: many productions are taking place at once, many territorial layers exist at each space and have different rhythms, and there are a multitude of non-hierarchical relationships between territorial productions.
After introducing the concept of territorial complexity early on, Kärrholm puts it aside in the first four chapters, and draws on his research in Scandinavia to discuss four themes of territorialisation (transformation) as case studies for his argument: separation, stabilisation, synchronisation and singularisation, each getting a detailed chapter of its own. ‘Separation’ (Chapter 2) is the divorce of retail space from its roots, neighbourhood and the city in general. As the corner shop gives way to the big box store and the mall, retail spaces have become increasingly disconnected from both residential areas and even local aesthetics. Through processes of autonomisation and agglomeration, retail space moves out to car-accessible, non-residential suburban locations, or even remains in the city center, but increasingly becomes disconnected in networks of pedestrianised and controlled streets and complexes, dominated by retail use. Indeed, these larger retail aggregations may even become regional rather than urban or local hubs.
This is not, of course, an uncontested process and thus ‘stabilization’ (Chapter 3) is a constant struggle as new approaches are adopted to resist the pressures of changing economic and demographic context and rival territorialisation, deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation. The aim is often to create a coherent and defensible – in economic and planning senses – ‘territory for shopping’, as much as anything else by material means such as pedestrianisation and connecting to supportive networks such as public transport.
In a fascinating further insight, Kärrholm also notes that retail has created new rhythms of life, from expanding daily ones (as 9–5 gives way to ‘eight till late’ and ‘open all hours’) and seasonal ones (which likewise change – witness the ever-earlier start of the Christmas sales). Then there are also the cycles created by shoppers, from when they are likely to be hungry in the day to when they are likely to buy what (swimming costumes in spring, coats in fall, pumpkins at Halloween). Thus, retail spaces are now prone to ‘synchronization’ (Chapter 4) as they react to these new rhythms. In this way, retail seeks to take advantage of the lacunae of daily life, from time spent waiting at the airport to the growing incursion of retail into the museum, the hospital, even the church.
If there are common processes, challenges and opportunities bearing upon retail space, does it mean that they are all the same? In an age of global brands and standardised architecture, it may sometimes seem so, but Kärrholm is keen to demonstrate that crass generalisations about homogenisation miss the tension between repetition and novelty that characterise ‘singularization’ (Chapter 5). This he describes as ‘the process by which a certain place, building or whatever becomes unique’ (pp. 95–96). While there is, admittedly, a relatively narrow range of archetypes for retail buildings, these are not static and exist in symbiosis with usage and conceptual environment. Indeed, retail buildings are especially prone to regular reinvention. Market halls maintain their shells while being transformed into malls, a one-off building becomes copied and a new archetype. Retail spaces as a whole are constantly seeking to maintain a dynamic balance between the uniqueness that helps brand them, and the recognisability that helps stabilise the territory, clearly marking it for what it is.
In the end, Kärrholm returns to the notion of territorial complexity. This is presented as a virtue, the co-existence of numerous and different territorial productions in the same space, such that the creation of retail zones, for example, need not crowd out all other uses and identities: the bookstore is also a coffee shop which, in turn, is a place where a particular community can cohere; the overlap between an expanding retail zone and a traditional residential one creates interstitial spaces adding a pleasing complexity and distinctiveness. In Kärrholm’s eyes, the privatisation of public space so often associated with the creation of distinct retail territories is not the problem itself, so much as the erasure of architectural and functional complexities that so often accompanies it.
Empirically, the book draws heavily on historical material but nonetheless stays true to its main goal of examining the territorial and spatial transformations of public space since the rise of the new consumer society in the 1990s. While some might argue the heavy emphasis on case studies from Sweden, Kärrholm suggests that its retail development is comparable to other countries in the West and similar phenomena can be found elsewhere. The value of the book is not perhaps so much in its empirical contribution as much as in its thought-provoking theoretical exploration of architecture’s role in territorialisation, and the introduction to a new way of looking at recent transformations in public space.
In short, Kärrholm’s book is a testament not only to the importance of the retail space within urban studies but also the necessity of retaining complexities, contradictions and the interstitial zones in which they flourish and survive. His view is that ‘retail is, and probably always has been, an important and often integrating and generating aspect of urban life’ (p. 133). He explores how architecture, as a means for creating materialities, can serve to produce ‘territories and thus territorial complexity’ (p. 127). He goes further in suggesting that architectural production must also address two other elements: making different usages of territories visible and accommodating new issues arising in everyday life (p. 127). To this end, Kärrholm considers architectural ways of accommodation through physical flexibility (moving walls, etc.) and polyvalence (where a space may accommodate different functions while not changing in form). These offer potential remedies for the territorialisation of public space by retail that threatens territorial complexity.
While the themes of this book may be familiar to architectural theorists focusing on urban space, it nonetheless offers social scientists an important and sophisticated elucidation of retail’s effect on the public domain in ways that in turn shape everyday life. It also puts forth a new way of thinking about the role of architecture in social life and a new vocabulary for ongoing discussion. In its own way, the book itself is an exercise in ‘conceptual territorialisation,’ representing an important contribution to our understanding of how retail spaces develop and are structured and, in the process, affect the evolution of the contemporary city itself.