Negotiating Urban Fabric: Unveiling the Dynamics of Retail Urbanism in the Costanera Center Megamall Development

Abstract

Costanera Center is a mega real estate development that symbolizes the urban processes of negotiation, debate, and struggle in the social production of space. Through a deliberate urbanism driven by and for consumerism, the area is consolidated as a piece of the city designed for the citizen/consumer. However, the effects of the megamall also ended up being less analyzed by the local and international literature, such as the increase in informal street commerce, the installation of pirate merchandise resellers, and the arrival of a new land use plan inspired by informal commercial pedestrianization and the late response of local authorities.

All in all, the megamall, with its modern and glazed appearance, is surrounded today by an informality typical of Latin American tertiary economies, thus constituting a hybrid space of local culture and global consumption that surpasses normative and disciplinary analyses. The following article analyzes the stages and those involved in the production of the ‘city of consumption’, and evidences the causal relationships involved in decision-making on urban development, questioning the recursive vision of the dialectic between public and private actors on an eventual inert urban space.

As a blog, it seeks to dispel the recent urban history of a paradigmatic case of Latin American real estate development, to set precedents for future planning on the city, and conclude that the dynamics of ‘retail urbanism’ affects both consumption practices and the normative organizations of the city, determining the consolidation, by both public and private actors, of areas of the city oriented exclusively to the promotion of retail consumption as an economic activity that produces the urban.