Way-out Westfield is about cashing in – Building Design
Seen from the Green, Westfield’s grey-panelled walls appear like the East End docks in their heydey: fortress-like ramparts to keep out the riff-raff. But the mall’s real barriers are more subtle than that. Anyone is welcome to wander in, but the true price of entry is invisible: access to loads of ready cash and the leisure to spend it. And to judge from the number of black-clad, walkie talkie-wielding security staff on hand, one false move and you’d find yourself evicted.
Whatever one thinks of Westfield, it is certainly very BIG, and, in uncertain times, it raises some big questions: about community, class, public space, civility. It feels like an airport, because it could be anywhere — which begs the question of whether it really needs to be anywhere at all. Unlike London, where it happens to have landed, Westfield will stand or fall on its ability to make a profit. It has everything to do with capitalism, and nothing to do with urbanity.