Shopping town Australia, 1945-1973 building a modern nation

Building on the research that Dr Janina Gosseye has conducted into the post-war development of shopping centres in Europe, this project seeks to demonstrate that analogous design strategies to those that can be recognised in (government-supported) community infrastructure underlay the development of shopping centres in post-war Australia.

Related Publications

Journal Articles

Janina Gosseye, “The Holy Trinity of Modernity: Leisure, Suburbia and the Shopping Centre”, 2ha (April 2015).

Janina Gosseye, Peter Vernon, “Shopping Towns Australia, 1957-1967: From Reformist Figure of Collectivity to Box of Gold”, in: AnnMarie Brennan & Philip Goad (eds.) Proceedings of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand, 33, Gold (Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2016), 216-227.

Books

Janina Gosseye, Tom Avermaete (eds.), Shopping Towns Europe 1945-1975: Commercial Collectivity and the Architecture of the Shopping Centre (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017).

Janina Gosseye, Tom Avermaete (eds.), Acculturating the Shopping Centre (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2018).

Conference Presentations

“Shopping Centre Excursions: The Low Countries’ Quest for a Fitting Paradigm” at the 5^th International Colloquium on Commerce and the City: A Relationship of Origin [University of São Paolo – São Paolo, Brazil, 21-24 March 2016]

“Milton Keynes’ Centre: The Apotheosis of the British Post-war Consensus or, an Apostle of Neo-liberalism?” at the Architecture of Deregulations symposium: Post-modernism, Politics and the Built Environment in Europe, 1975-1995 [School of Architecture KTH – Stockholm, Sweden, 10-12 March 2016]

“The Janus-faced Shopping Centre: The Low Countries in Search of a Fitting Shopping Centre Paradigm” at the CHORD Conference: Retailing and Distribution History [University of Wolverhampton — Wolverhampton, U.K., 10 September 2015]

Engagement

In the spring of 2017, Dr Gosseye was invited to curate an exhibition on post-war shopping centres in Europe. On April 25^th 2017, the ‘Shopping Towns Europe 1945-1975’ exhibition opened in the Flanders Architecture Institute (VAi) in Antwerp, Belgium. This exhibition was co-curated by Dr Gosseye and Tom Avermaete, Professor of Architecture at the Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands.

Featuring six key European shopping centres and a detailed chronological overview of shopping centre development, the exhibition explores the role that shopping centres played in urban (re)development in post-war Europe, and examines how their architecture was designed to introduce new conceptions of collectivity into the Europeans’ everyday lives.

‘Shopping Towns Europe’ drew significant interest from the media: the exhibition was reviewed by both De Tijd and de Standaard, two of Belgium’s largest newspapers, and also an interview with Prof Avermaete, which profiled the exhibition, took place for the radio show ‘Pompidou’, which was aired on May 15^th, 2017, on the national radio-station Klara,

Since commencing the ‘Shopping Towns Australia’ research, Dr Gosseye has also been invited to give several public lectures on the subject of post-war shopping centres:

• “Shopping Towns Europe 1945-‘75” [Flanders Architecture Institute — Antwerp, Belgium, 25 April 2017]

• “Constructing Consumer-citizens: Shopping Centres Shaping Commercial Collectivity” [University of Catania — Catania, Italy, 27 April 2017]
• “Shopping Towns: A Story of Firsts” at Pecha Kucha Night Brisbane, vol. 48 (organised by the Brisbane Powerhouse in collaboration with the 2017 Asia Pacific Forum) [Brisbane Powerhouse – Brisbane, Australia, 22 March 2017]