Mallopoly: A Game of Building Agglomeration

In the early phases of North American urban dispersal buildings seemed to repel each other with maximum entropy producing a scattered urban form. Over the last twenty years they have been clumped together, gathering around significant structures such as malls. Though initially invented for their interior, malls now play a figurative role in urban space.This paper is a fictional account of built-up form around ten regional malls in Toronto.When considered with the city’s highway system, malls operate as a game board, a base condition over which future building would play out. Some buildings aggregated around malls, while others were built further along the highway. The resultant regional form first appears as a scattering of dissociated objects, or sprawl; yet when viewed through the lens of a game, a logic emerges that we argue may be leveraged to produce moments of figural and social collectivity that can be defined within what appears to be an otherwise individualized landscape of Toronto’s contemporary suburban space. This research is about such building agglomerations, and speculates on a series of game-like rules that may have played a part in their production.

Volume Editors
David Ruy & Lola Sheppard

ISBN
978-0-935502-95-4