ABSTRACT
The Beverly Centre is a three-level shopping mall sitting on a five-storey parking
lot, at a major intersection in West Hollywood, Los Angeles. At street level is the
Planet Hollywood restaurant with its iconic advertising image of a car entering
the street wall. A constantly changing digital sign documents the world’s rising
population and its declining acreage of rainforest for an audience primarily
sitting in traffic (Figure 9.1). Across the globe, closer to both the population and
the rainforest, is a city which is similar in more than size. Blok M Plaza in down-
town Jakarta is a close cousin of the Beverly Centre and employs its urban wall to
support a giant video screen flashing images to the passing, though often
jammed, traffic (Figure 9.2). Los Angeles has a reputation for privileging wheels
over feet, and for pioneering sequestered zones of safety in a dangerous urban
public realm (Davis 1991; Flusty 1997). The main streets of Jakarta present one
of the worst pedestrian environments in urban history. Only the poor walk any-
where, and to do so they must negotiate tiny strips of sidewalk which are often
blocked. Yet through the portals of either of these malls one experiences an
inversion of urban spatial experience. The difficulties and tensions of public space
are eased as one enters a protected realm of consumption and spectacle. The
enclosed retail environment of the private shopping mall was the most popular
and successful new building type of the second half of the twentieth century. It
is in many ways the quintessential building type of the age, embodying new and
evolving forms of subjectivity, representation and spatial practice.
