¿…More ‘center’ tan ‘shopping’?

Shopping centers are one of the most striking elements of the contemporary European city, an indispensable place of consumption itself and, increasingly, one of the key places of daily life. For some theorists, these typologies are places where everything is accessible in a comfortable and secure way. For others, they are the epitome of advanced capitalism, in an era in which consumption pervades all dimensions of contemporary life. If notions such as center and periphery, public and private, or nonplace and place, are now challenged by the hybrid nature of these commercial typologies, that is precisely because the city itself has dramatically changed over the past years. In a context in which the shopping centers gradually accumulate the functions of prime sites of consumption and gravitational centers of the metropolitan condition, this article will explore how this commercial formula is progressively affirmed as both the shopping & center of the contemporary European city