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Hardcover - 2001

Project on the City II: The Harvard Guide to Shopping

By The Harvard Graduate School of Design

Shopping is arguably the last remaining form of public activity. The Harvard Guide to Shopping, made by the Harvard Graduate School of Design and OMA, explores the spaces, people, techniques, ideologies, and inventions by which shopping has so dramatically refashioned the city at the turn of the century.

Through a battery of increasingly predatory forms, shopping has infiltrated, colonized, and even replaced, almost every aspect of urban life. Town centers, suburbs, streets, and now airports, train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the Internet, and the military are shaped by the mechanisms and spaces of shopping. The voracity by which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal - if only - modes by which we experience the city. Perhaps the beginning of the 21st century will be remembered as the point where the urban could no longer be understood without shopping.