Reality check

There was a lightness in the hearts of the mall developers present at Eurobuild’s retail conference. However, a new rival might just be about to rear its head A  shopping centre is a public institution. The success of shopping centres in Poland results from the fact that public spaces have been developed that the authorities had given up on, believes Grzegorz Makowski, a sociologist from the Institute of Public Affairs. He is also the author of the book ‘The temple of consumption. The origin and social significance of the shopping centre’, which opened this year’s retail sector meeting that took place in the Warsaw InterContinental hotel on May 12th. While addressing the assembled market players as a theoretician, he referred to the ‘godfather’ of the shopping centre concept, Victor Gruen, an architect and urban planner from Vienna, who finding himse