3 - Making the Modern Shopping City

Summary

This chapter examines the unprecedented era of urban rebuilding which took off in the late 1950s and lasted into the 1970s, in which enthusiasm for ‘comprehensive’ town centre redevelopment and modernist urban renewal was at its peak. This was the era when shopping malls were imported from the United States and planted at the centre of British towns and cities, and these developments rested upon an unusual alignment between the modernist planning ideals of urban professionals, the developmental agendas of local authorities and the commercial strategies of a handful of development companies. I stress how important the rhetoric of modernisation was in uniting these different interests, but also how loosely and variably notions of ‘the modern’ were defined and applied. I also highlight the importance of the technocratic enthusiasms of the age, particularly in the early 1960s, when the idea of engineering efficient urban environments came to the fore. Planners, policymakers and property developers adopted a deeply Taylorist, mechanistic idea of urban renewal, in which prosperity, efficiency and growth would be precisely engineered while ‘obsolescence’ would be excised from the modern city with surgical precision. For urban authorities facing darkening economic prospects, these were seductive ideas, and viewed as a means to combat the onset of deindustrialisation.