The shopping center : a new way of "being together"?

Abstrak

The appropriation of certain spaces in the city-shopping centers-, privatized and lived by people as places of meeting and communication seem to show the transformations of urban forms of relating, that is, the transformations of the various ways of "being together ". The persistent attendance of men or women, young or old, changes the shopping center from an anonymous place to a built, appropriate, intimate territory. Feeling accompanied by "others" perceived as close by their characteristics "similar to their own", the feeling of protection and security they provide, makes it possible to affirm how the attendees who frequently attend a shopping center have appropriated the place as a space of attachment and communication that allows them to recognize themselves as part of a specific social and cultural environment.