BLURRING THE BOUNDARIES The interface of shopping centres and surrounding urban public space Samira Abbasalipour PhD Candidate, Faculty of Built Environment, University of New South Wales Bruce Judd Associate Professor, Faculty of Built Environment, University of New South Wales ABSTRACT Shopping centres are a prevailing feature of today’s urban life, but their relation to the public realm is frequently criticised for subtracting ‘publicness’ from the urban environment. In the last twenty years there has been a shift away from the common inward-looking and enclosed shopping centre design towards designs that attempt to embrace the surrounding areas. This trend towards the opening up of shopping centres to their surroundings has led to the emergence of new kind of spaces, where the public space of the city and the private space of the shopping centre meet and overlap - what will be termed ‘interface spaces’ in this paper. In this context, the changing interface of shopping centres and the surrounding urban (public) space is reorienting the public/private spatial interconnectivity and consequently also the urban life experience resulting in the production of new public spaces. Through the case study of the recently- developed Rouse Hill Town Centre, in NSW, this paper sets out to consider the effects that the blurring of the boundaries between public and private spaces can have on urban life and vitality. INTRODUCTION In agrarian and preindustrial societies the shape of bazaars and marketplaces indicated the significance of the everyday needs and desires of society. The city form was a response to socio-spatial relations, as well as economic and political structures of the civil society. This is clearly illustrated in the case of Middle Eastern Bazaar Fig. 1. Indeed the distinctive form and central location of the Bazaar has defined it as an entirely inseparable part of the city as a whole. Socio-spatial aspects of the society are demonstrated by the public space structure, the physical shape and activities within, “a dynamic ensemble of people and environment” (Dovey, 2010: 7). It can be argued that these consumption spaces were originally a city’s focal points, from which other buildings of the city developed. Figure 1: The Esfahan Bazaar. From left to right: Plan of Esfahan Bazaar and the surrounding residential area (F.Kiani, 1985) and the current Google Earth image (2011). Having a notion about the earliest consumption spaces, the current trend towards the opening up of shopping centres to their surroundings reveals a comparable image. In the last twenty years there has been a shift away from the common inward-looking and enclosed shopping centre design towards approaches that attempt to embrace surrounding areas. These transformations lead to the emergence of ‘interface spaces’, which have a noticeable effect on urban spaces and public life, physically and experientially. This trend towards the opening up of shopping centres to their surroundings is increasingly common in developed countries such as Australia. There are many examples of transformed or refurbished shopping centres in the Sydney metropolitan area that unlike the inward-looking spaces of big-box type shopping malls, are now open to, and integrated with their surroundings Fig. 2.