Abstract
The study of the retail built environment, or architectural geography, stands apart from the current Czech and Slovak human geography agenda. However, in Anglo-American literature there is a substantial body of research around this topic and the analysis of the symbolical meanings of the architectural environment.
The paper aims to set out a theoretical framework based on the works of Jon Goss and to identify some of the elements he described for the U.S. retail built environment within the dynamically evolving Czech context. This paper presents the results of a qualitative study in three selected shopping malls in Prague.
The fieldwork focused mainly on the identification of cues acknowledging the existence of civic, liminal or transformational spaces, various spatial or temporal archetypes, the function of the retail environment as an instrumental space or socio-spatial system. The presented project should also serve to introduce qualitative research tools (participant observation, ethnography, phenomenology, semiotic reading etc.) into academic work in current Czech and Slovak retail geography While there are not many symbolic meanings or archetypes to be found in the selected malls, there are clear signs of the mall operating as a spatial system and instrumental space.
Thus, Czech malls are currently in a transitional state of the retail built environment functioning between the effective transactional space that aims to foster consumption and expenditure and a symbolic context of consumption offering the experience of "elsewhere" known from U.S. shopping malls.