A new living room for south-east

Abstract

The easily accessible location, the comfort of various facilities, the architectural quality and the space for meeting, all this created a new typology that could not be thought out of everyday life anymore. The mall gave a glimpse of a modern future, where the mall functioned as merely a place to shop; it functioned as a center for cultural enrichment, education and relaxation. However, it turned out that many
of these malls soon developed into commercial paradises. There was little room for social functions and meeting space, the only thing to do was shopping. An important reason for the failure of this typology may therefore be that shopping malls were never implemented as they were intended: as social beacons within the community. Use changed over the years, leading to many vacancies and a growing sense of social unsafety.

To preserve the existing typology of the mall, it seems important to strengthen its local relevance. Initially, the mall was designed as a social space, a place for cultural enrichment, education and relaxation. Somewhere along the way, this social value gradually disappeared; the mall is now mainly focused on shops. This research
tries to find which architectural elements can support the local relevance of the mall. It analyses the social value of the mall by the presence of place attachment. The level of place attachment is researched by different functional and emotional architectural attributes. Showing that the combination of diversity in public space, program, activity and people and more social safety will lead to a higher level of place attachment and therefore lead to more social value within an area.