Commercial Urban Fabrics Updating. Retail globalization and Shopping cultural areas

Over 60 years after the beginning of the importation process of North-american model of suburban commercial specialized fabrics in the Euro-mediterranean area, the strong crisis and the consequent changes (e-commerce etc.) that are affecting the retail sector, require a new reading of the phenomenon to identify perspectives for a transformation and rebalancing of the existing build environnement. Starting from the 60s, the massive introduction of the Supermarket type and, then, the Shopping mall type, together with the related suburban fabric, have greatly contributed to the crisis of urban life in the Euro- mediterranean cities by operating a complex insertion of some serial characters of the North-american metropolis in the context of a plastic/organic area. The phenomenon of mutual exchange between the two cultures, if on the one hand has seen the introduction of North-american models with exclusively commercial specialized fabrics (mall) in the Euro- mediterranean area, from another one sees, in the last decades, transformations of North American specialized fabrics that seem to refer to more organic models of formative and trasformative processes. The reading of the contradictory development and possible conversion processes of the commercial fabrics in the two cultural areas constitutes the focus of the paper, in the perspective of a “processual” design.