The Politics of Peripheral Shopping Centre Development in Northwest Europe in the 1990s: The Cases of Manchester, Amsterdam and Oberhausen

Ah, the bright lights, the soft music, the stairways to heaven, the shoes. To Americans malls have assumed the place of churches, with or without the shoes, but consumers in Manchester, Amsterdam and Oberhausen may think differently. Avers (Netherlands Institute for Spatial Research) found that his initial perception that malls were the gates to various types of hell, ranging from the social to the aesthetic and economic, became tempered in his study of US suburb-style malls as they have been introduced in three European cities. His study includes the effects of relative economic and social power amongst those proposing and building the malls and those who are supposed to use them, the social contexts surrounding the malls, and the reasons why two malls in question survived while one became a social and economic embarrassment. Annotation 2008 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)