Retailing - Birth, death and shopping
Gruen wanted to improve upon the American city center by modernizing and Europeanizing it. Mr Caruso, by contrast, looks to the past. He has tried to re-create a kind of prelapsarian downtown where there is no crime or homelessness. His romantic evocations of city centres are possible only because people have forgotten what downtowns used to be like. And they have forgotten, of course, largely because of the suburban shopping malls that Gruen built. It was necessary to kill the American city center before bringing it back to life.
No comments:
Post a Comment