Space production and city fragmentation: shopping malls in non-metropolitan areas

Abstract

The relationships between space and time are of formative importance to the comparition proposed in this work, between two brazilian shopping malls: Boulevard Londrina Shopping and Shopping Iguatemi Ribeirao. They were chosen due to their clear similarities, such as having both opened in 2013 and being targeted to upper and middle class customers, but also for their different locations: nearly central and in the outskirts of town, respectively, which are revealing of the capacity of shopping malls to adapt to any place, and create new spaces. Thus, based on contradictory characteristics such as homogeneity and heterogeneity, connection and disconnection, liberty and restraint, shopping malls have been expanding their capacity to stimulate the process of sociospatial fragmentation in middle cities. New strategies have been employed with the aid of great investors such as the Sonae Sierra group and the Iguatemi chain, in order to create complex new spaces in cities, which are not limited to the shopping malls, but begin with them.