Over the last year I’ve watched with a slight tinge of bewilderment as the Westfield London Shopping Centre has materialised out of the wastelands around BBC Television Centre. Built in a style that is horrifically fashionable these days (see any recent Tube station, bus terminal, or cheap office block), an architecture clearly based on the notion that burnished sheet metal, polyurethane resin, and oblique angles equals contemporary, there is nothing decorated about this shed: it’s a minimalist cathedral to consumerism, the flying buttresses having been replaced by whitewashed steel supports, the naves multiplied and covered with coffered Plexiglas vaults offering stingy glimpses of the unruly heavens just beyond the protective skin of the building. Yet there is nothing inspiring, interesting, or even remotely ironic about the structure: it is, without question, the quintessence of drab, entirely devoid of even a hint of post-apocalyptic bleakness that would at least redeem it by triggering a visceral reaction. It is almost the physical incarnation of an online shopping experience, a collection of stores aggregated and ordered against the stark white page of a Google search. But none of this is what gives me incredible unease about the place. After all, a mall is a mall, and I’m almost willing to trade a little character for a well-stocked Waitrose ten walking minutes away. What stresses me out more than anything else is the ease with which a suburban experience born out of the accessibility afforded by the automobile, the most evil thing going, has flourished within an urban space.
In Dawn of the Dead, the post-apocalyptic vision par excellence of suburban America fuelled by (predominantly white) flight from urban centres, George Romero showed us where we’re going, and a quick stroll through the Westfield shows us that we’ve already arrived. Dazed shoppers bobble about in search of fleshy brands, ravenous hordes foraging for material goods driven by a now primordial urge to stoke the engines of commerce. Why do they come here? “Some kind of instinct,” our hero Stephen tells us. Like the Monroeville Mall, the Westfield is its own village; it’s a vision of the perfect capitalist utopia, where even the architecture has become invisible to allow brands to compete for attention. It’s public space inverted, a private space made to appear public, and it cannot conceive of anything outside of itself. Like the intrepid colonists in Dawn of the Dead, we barricade ourselves against the chaotic world without, unsavoury and improperly socialised characters clawing mindlessly against panes of glass offering tantalising glimpses of a lifestyle that, for them, is just beyond reach. But there is hope for these tired, poor, huddled masses: the mall is a sign of the engines of indoctrination into the capitalist machine, through which one can attain any status one desires based purely on the ability to pay.
I recently gave a presentation to a gathering of BBC business stakeholders on the relative merits of cross-divisional content sharing and to open the discussion I compared the BBC website to the cityscape of London. The site has grown organically over the last decade, often reflecting internal corporate divisions and political structure rather than audience goals. It is a mass of cyber-communities, many of them isolated and autonomous, making it confusing and difficult to navigate. London developed in much the same way. Seen from overhead, London’s slow organic growth over centuries is vividly apparent. Villages, neighbourhoods, and even streets developed independently of each other, often with little interconnecting logic except vague attempts at joining up to major avenues. Dead ends abound. These villages were constructed either to keep people in or to keep people out; they were (and still are to a great extent) communities built around exclusivity and the tension between public and private ownership. Because of this patchwork quilt, I have often referred to London not as a metropolis (Modern New York City wins that title with its easily navigable grid comfortably tying together different neighbourhoods) but as a cosmopolis, a collection of self-contained villages, each with its own character (or, as can be the case, lack of character), each possessing an internal navigational logic, and each existing independently yet depending on the others, like organs in the body of the city. Proof is in the fact that one needs a map in London any time one steps out of a familiar zone; hostility towards the pedestrian is painfully apparent in the number of violent flyovers, disorienting roundabouts, and de-humanising subterranean crosswalks smelling of urine and dank earth. And only in a city that’s less a city and more a collection of villages could such a closed, exclusive community like the Westfield develop within the fabric of the urban space, a space that should intend to integrate rather than segregate. I think I may take my chances with the zombies outside.