Fun Shopping : on Architecture and Consumer Culture

‘Silos and chimneys and sooty facades are disappearing from the cityscape, and harbour swimming baths, artificial beaches, sidewalk cafés, skating rinks, climbing walls etc. electrify the life of the city. The City has become a scene of events. Experience is of course the motor in the so-called ‘experience-society,’ and to modern urban planners and urban designers ‘cultural planning’ has become a mantra. The aim of this book is to encircle and pin down the consequences of these developments, to elucidate the interplay between funscapes and fear culture, and to account for the meaning of new concepts and new phenomena such as “event culture,” “urban scenography,” “experience economy,” “city branding” and “cultural branding.” A number of cases refer to Danish cities, but the urban horizon – or skyline – is widened by cases such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Barcelona, Bangkok, Las Vegas, Malmø, Toronto and Wolfsburg. “First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin,” Leonard Cohen sang, and one of the articles has borrowed this line for its title.’

Download og læs Boris Brorman Jensens artikel om shopping arkitektur og konsumæstetik i Marling og Zerlangs antologi ‘Fun City’ her.