Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping

SHOPPING is arguably the last remaining form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has infiltrated, colonized, and even replaced, almost every aspect of urban life. Town centers, suburbs, streets, and now airports, train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet, and the military are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. The voracity by which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal-if only-modes by which we experience the city. The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping explores the spaces, people, techniques, ideologies, and inventions by which shopping has so dramatically refashioned the city. Perhaps the beginning of the twenty-first century will be remembered as the point where the urban could no longer be understood without shopping. The PROJECT ON THE CITY, formerly known as "The Project for What Used to be the City," is an ongoing research effort that examines the effects of modernization on the urban condition. Each year the Project on the City investigates a specific urban region or a general urban condition undergoing virulent change. It tries to capture and decipher ongoing mutations in order to develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for phenomena that can no longer be described within the traditional categories of architecture, landscape, and urban planning. The first project, Great Leap Forward, focuses on the new forms and speeds of urbanization in the Pearl River Delta, China. The second project investigates the impact of shopping on the city. The third project explores the urban condition of Lagos, Nigeria. The fourth project treats the invention and expansion of the "systematic" Roman city as an early version of modernization and a prototype for the current process of globalization.