All The World S A Mall

All the World’s a Mall details a whirlwind world tour in five stops: Edmonton, Beijing, Kuala Lumpur, Dubai, and Casablanca, chosen because they are home to some of the biggest malls on the planet. Cities within cities, these malls are wonderlands where visitors come from afar to: walk, eat, sleep, watch, swim, ride, photograph, and, of course, shop. With a curious, critical, and sometimes ironic eye, Swiss journalist Rinny Gremaud recounts her travels to and through these monstrous spaces of excess, relaying her conversations with patrons, employees, and executives, and contemplating the effects of globalized commerce. Informative and thoughtful, exhilarating and exhausting, jet-lagged and always air conditioned, All the World’s a Mall is a truly memorable, hallucinatory adventure.

While working at the mall, organizing a school fundraiser, and trying to prove that her best friend's boyfriend is seeing another girl, high-school student Charlotte's best intentions always seem to backfire.

Actor Dennis Weaver, star of television's "McCloud," and host of the Western Channel, shares the story of his childhood and military years, his acting career, and his later life activities as a spokesperson for social and environmental concerns.

Those lucky enough to have seats are faced with a dilemma: the floor, with a full night of accumulated rubbish, is an unattractive surface on which to exercise. They solve the problem by standing on their chairs instead, from which vantage point they attempt to carry out the arm stretches, squats and jumping jacks called out by the Chinese Railway s fitness guru. After five years in London, Samit Sawhny decides to move back to India the long way. Vowing not to board a plane between London and Delhi, he heads east with a backpack, and soon finds himself where no Indian has gone before. After experiencing twenty-four-hour sunlight in Norway and teaching Europeans to play kabaddi in Helsinki, Samit watches Russians sunbathe standing up in St Petersburg and takes a stiff swig of Moscow s nightlife. Crossing the cultural border into Asia, he marvels at the courtship rituals of Yakutian women and the Siberian taste for B-grade Bollywood idols. Mongolia reveals the joys of open-air billiards, fermented mare s milk and stunningly pristine countryside; in China, Samit fishes for cormorants, watches the modernization march and follows briefly in Vikram Seth s footsteps. Tibet brings thrilling treks to Mt Kailash and Everest Base Camp, not to mention a hair-raising encounter with some boy monks. The journey comes full circle in Kathmandu, where Samit finds himself discussing The Real India with a group of Western backpackers. Called upon to define Indian culture, he rises to the occasion and finds that some things never change. Born of a talent for seeing order (and humour) in chaos, All the World s a Spittoon is a rollicking journal of a road less travelled.

Hong Kong is the twenty-first-century paradigmatic capital of consumerism. Of all places, it has the densest and tallest concentration of malls, reaching tens of stories. Hong Kong’s malls are also the most visited, sandwiched between subways and skyscrapers. These mall complexes have become cities in and of themselves, accommodating tens of thousands of people who live, work, and play within a single structure. Mall City features Hong Kong as a unique rendering of an advanced consumer society. Retail space has come a long way since the nineteenth-century covered passages of Paris, which once awed the bourgeoisie with glass roofs and gaslights. It has morphed from the arcade to the department store, and from the mall into the “mall city”—where “expresscalators” crisscross mesmerizing atriums. Highlighting the effects of this development in Hong Kong, this book raises questions about architecture, city planning, culture, and urban life. “At the nexus of density, humidity, topography, and prosperity, Hong Kong has spawned more malls per square mile than any place on earth. This fantastic book decodes and graphically depicts an environment both apart and ubiquitous, a convulsive form of public space in a liquid territory where intensely contested politics, commerce, and sociability weirdly merge in a city like no other.” —Michael Sorkin, distinguished professor of architecture of the City University of New York “Hong Kong may be packed with the most shopping malls per square kilometer in the world, but Mall City is packed with the most drawings, information, and fascinating mall facts. The book dissects, categorizes, and displays all kinds of intriguing data on the city-state’s shopping complexes and culture. Its richly layered analysis perfectly matches Hong Kong’s multi-story machines for consumption.” —Clifford Pearson, director of USC American Academy in China “Stefan Al has again produced a book that provides a sharp lens on radically new urban forms that are emerging in China. While his previous books, Villages in the City andFactory Towns of South China introduced the site of production and housing for the migrant labor of the Pearl River Delta, here we enter the phantasmagoria of the enormous interconnected free-trade shopping zone of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. Mall City dissects the basic unit of this climate-controlled consumer landscape—the mall. This beautifully illustrated book is a must-read for those who wish to understand the future of public space in high-density cities.” —Brian McGrath, professor of urban design and dean of constructed environments, Parsons School of Design