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How could shopping centers provide social spaces that encourage reflective consumption?

Globalisation increased the length of production chains, resulting in a disconnection between producer and consumer. Farmers markets, community gardens, and local brand preferences are examples of an emerging consumer shift to local production, especially through food. However these models are alternative, expensive and isolated from mainstream shopping centres, which offer convenience and choice.  Shopping centers have also become socialising and entertainment spaces.

How could shorter production and consumption chains could be organised architecurally within shopping centers?  Today’s shopping centers are integrated- there is no connection to production whilst shopping and socialising takes place at the same time in the same space. "PCI" separates these activities by creating distinct areas of consumption (shopping) and socialising (public space), and incorporates production using industrialised urban agriculture.

Whilst the areas are distinctly separate there are some places where the activities overlap. The production space keeps young fragile plants (taken from cuttings) separate until they are more robust.  As the crop matures,  it is moved into the public space and grows there until harvest. The resulting produce is sold in the shopping center, and other outputs are used elsewhere within the building. Resources for the plants are harvested from the building, and the aeroponic plant infrastructure physically connects the production, public and consumption spaces, while providing the buildings' services.

Within the design the public space is privileged over consumption space and becomes somewhat like a park. However at times the public space and consumption space also integrate. This occurs when consumption is more social or directly linked to production: cinemas, farmers markets, communal kitchens are examples of this.

"PCI" encourages more awareness on the part of consumers, attempting to change shopping practices and integrating urban food production with a mall environment.

Key Research Sources:
‘The Omnivore’s Dilemma’ – Michael Pollen, 2006 Bloomsbery Publishing
www.biocontrols.com – Aeroponic Growing Information
'Shopping Centres in Australia – Vital Statistics' Shopping Centre Council of Australia, www.propertyoz.com.au
‘The Architectural Brain’ – Mark Wigley, Network Practices – New Strategies in Architecture and Design, Princeton Architectural Press 2007
‘Willing consumers—or locked-in? Policies for a sustainable consumption’ - Christer Sanne - Urban Studies, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), S-10044, Stockholm, Sweden, 2002
‘West Side Convergence; urban processes [New York]’ – Jesse Reiser & Nanako Umemoto - Architectural design, vol. 70, no. 3, pp. 78-89, June 2000

PCI offers a new alternative to the existing consumption spaces within outer suburbia.  Adopting a component-based construction system allows flexibility in site selection and the option to expand or decrease the building in response to popularity. By making the specific program of the centre interrelated with growing cycles, the project hopes to raise awareness of natural production and concurrently reduce excessive consumption. Natural production is the dominant program with which the public interacts, and the consumption zones are demoted to spaces which are interdependent on natural growth cycles. Aeroponic technology organically grows food at a faster rate than any other system and being largely comprised of air-based-cells, it can be positioned off the ground plane with relative ease. The service space at the bottom of the building; the developed proposal has been designed as a prototype that ideally could be implemented on any site. Production space integrated with public space - people can use the walkways threaded through the crops. The spaces within the centre become responsive to local food production. Authenticity in consumption is manifested in PCI by the introduction of natural production. As a hybrid shopping centre of production and consumption, PCI encourages new sustainable practices both within shopping centre design and in the everyday habits of consumers.