Arcades 3.0. il tempo dell' Asia nei luoghi del commercio

The mall and the shopping center are the final result, in order of time (but not necessarily the only one), of a process that has led the commercial function to a progressive expulsion from the urban fabric. This radical transformation of the places of commerce, originally generated from a deep relationship with the spaces of the city, has caused a functional and semantic impoverishment of the urban fabric. In this sense the new commercial temples appear different from the types from which they derived, like the bazaar, the department store, the passage and the galleria; This process is largely responsible for the present distressing landscape of the western suburbs, consisting of an endless expanse of houses, without services and collective places. In the Asian area, on the contrary, the so-called “commercial fabric” is still an integral part of the evolution of the urban form, revealing the innumerable possibilities of hybridization between apparently distinct architectural types (such as skyscrapers and underground or covered walkways). Whether it is new relationships with the existing urban structure (such as the SouthKorean Underground arcade or in the Hong Kong CEW) or the extreme consequences of a process already historicized (like the Japanese shōtengai), the Asian examples show how the commercial fabric is at the base of the creation of urban places for the community, absent until now in the urban tradition of that geographical area, from whose lesson it can be derived a new urbanity also for our cities.