Principales resultados obtenidos. Comparación con otros procesos de

The Olympic Park exists in the shadow of the Westfield shopping centre. It is the easiest route of pedestrian access from the east and the Park's point of connection to London's underground and overground trains. Further, the Westfield serves as a destination in itself, exerting a pull at least as strong as the Park's open spaces and stadia. With the surrounding outdoor shopping areas taken into account, the Westfield is the largest shopping centre in Europe and attracts visitors to match, taking £4 million during its first 24 hours (Peart, York, and Grainger, 2011). Opening a year prior to the games, its first 12 months saw 47 million visitors (9 million of whom came during the games themselves), a volume of shoppers 'equivalent to almost the entire population of England' (London Evening Standard, 2012).

Fig 34. The Westfield – as the day turns to dusk outside, its internal atmosphere remains unchanged (Buchan Group, 2016a)

The temporality of this space exists in sharp contrast to that of the reproductive spaces of the Park. This space is characterised by an abstract time that, rather than presenting a linear and divisible homogeneity feels still, the most

prominent markers of its passage erased. In the artificial environment of the mall a sense of time is obscured and confused. Walking into the Westfield from Stratford station, as the majority of its visitors do, means passing through an underpass, up an escalator, and directly into the shopping centre. At the entrance of this tunnel hangs a large clock – one last public display of time's progression before the suspended time of the Westfield is entered.

Jon Goss has persuasively outlined the ways in which the architecture and atmosphere of the mall is manufactured to encourage 'targeted users to move through the retail space and to adopt certain physical and social dispositions conducive to shopping' (Goss, 1993; 31). According to Goss the shopping centre is designed to attract consumers and keep them within its bounds for as long as possible (ibid; 22). This is an 'idealised social space free, by virtue of private property, planning, and strict control, from the inconvenience of the

weather and the danger and pollution of the automobile, but most importantly from the terror of crime associated with today's urban environment' (ibid; 24).

The Westfield stands as one such space, an anti-urban centrepiece within the Park's cluster of anti-urban spaces, highlighting the irony of naming its outdoor extension 'The Street'.

The Westfield's peculiar temporality is at the heart of this anti-urban character.

The city is the original domain of clock-time's extension into social life, and the street is defined by the complex rhythms of the everyday. The Westfield, however, closes off the linear progression of the clock and does away with rhythm as far as possible, replacing it with an easy drift. To this end, the

Westfield follows all the conventions of effective mall design. It is protected from the elements and maintained at a comfortable temperature; movement is

facilitated with as little exertion as possible by escalators; security are always visible and reassuring; and the natural light of the high glass roof is

supplemented with a gentle and steady artificial glow. Each of these elements serves to encourage a calm comfort on the part of the shopper and contributes to the erasure of a sense of passing time.

Goss remarks that 'for the postmodern consumer, temporality has collapsed, time is an extension of the moment' (ibid; 37). This is perfectly expressed in the basic shape of the Westfield's concourse, designed in the gentle curve often used in mall design because it 'fosters a sense of anticipation', pulling the shopper on while disguising the length of the walk (ibid; 33). This sense of anticipation is exactly that of the suspended moment – an anticipation forever delayed in order to distract the shopper from the concrete passage of time measured by their footsteps. Along with the homogenising influence of

architecture and atmosphere, this extended anticipation is fundamental to the temporality of the Westfield, fostered by its material form but realised in the practice of its users.

Goss also highlights the liminal sociality of malls as exchanges spaces, arguing that this liminality is related to the way in which 'the marketplace thrives on the possibility of “letting yourself go”, “treating yourself”, and of “trying it on” without risk of moral censure' (ibid; 27). This social licence constitutes the mall as a space of 'potentiality and transgression', played on by the careful manufacture of a nostalgic sense of carnival (ibid). Bordering the Olympic Park (and gate to the games during the mega-event), the Westfield has no lack of material to draw on when presenting this face. It bolsters this reflection of festival

atmosphere with regular performances by live musicians outside the food court, attractions themed around public holidays, and a sense of cosmopolitan

sociality encouraged by the restaurants and boutiques that populate 'The Plaza' and 'The Street'.

The suspended temporality of this space is intimately related to its liminality.

Goss draws heavily on Victor Turner's 'communitas' in describing the sociality of the mall, a central feature of which is the suspension, along with social

hierarchy, of the normal passage of social time: communitas is a 'moment in and out of time' (Turner, 1969; 96). The genesis of this suspended temporality can therefore be illuminated through an understanding of the liminal

atmosphere that it contributes towards. For Goss, this is a direct result of the needs of retailers. It is advantageous for them to encourage a sense of possibility as it makes shoppers more likely to part with their money. This is undoubtedly true to some extent – the atmosphere of the Westfield facilitates the realisation of value just as the games' festival character did. However, the liminality associated with spaces of exchange also has a deeper root,

originating in the structure of the exchange relationship itself.

In Volume I of Capital, Marx remarks that the market is a 'very Eden of the rights of man', the 'exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham' (Marx, 1867; 280). Here, buyers and sellers of commodities (including labour-power) confront each other as 'free persons' unconstrained by hierarchy and able to exchange that which they have the right of property over on the basis of

relative value alone. Spaces dedicated to the facilitation of exchange⁹ might be understood as akin to spaces of Turner's 'normative communitas', in which a certain liminality (within strict confines) is engendered as conducive to the reproduction of structuring social relationships. The Westfield therefore expresses and materialises the perfect conditions of consumer commodity exchange, reflecting this sense of freedom and equality.

Fig 35. The Street at the Westfield, decked out for Christmas (Sweetpea London, 2013)

The mall, as physical site of commodity exchange's normative communitas, becomes imbued not only with a liminal sense of equality and freedom

(expressed as Goss' carnival possibility), but also with its attendant temporality.

This temporality similarly arises from and plays a specific role within the

structure of the exchange relation. Sohn-Rethel highlights the way in which the abstract nature of the exchange relation imprints itself not only on the objects and the actors within that relation, but also on the time and space in which it exists. He argues that the physical activity of exchange is itself abstracted from the rest of social life, in that the use and exchange of a commodity are mutually exclusive (Sohn-Rethel, 1978; 46). Further, the commodities exchanged are

9 That is, the marketplace both as a social sphere defined by the bourgeois values of liberté, égalité, and fraternité, and as a physical space that comes to express the fullest embodiment of those qualities

themselves abstract, in that they are considered equal in value regardless of their different material forms and uses (ibid; 47). This constitutes a double abstraction in which exchange is predicated on a separation from other spheres of social life and a negation of the physical qualities of that which is exchanged.

The time and space of the exchange relation reflects this double abstraction.

Sohn-Rethel writes that the time and space associated with use – that of 'nature and the material activities of man, with the ripening of crops, the sequence of the seasons, the hunting of animals, with man's birth and death and all that happens in his lifespan' – is cancelled within the moment of exchange, which 'forces abstraction from all of this, for the objects of exchange remain immutable for the duration of the abstraction' (ibid; 48). The time of exchange is therefore 'emptied of all the material realities that form its contents in the sphere of use' (ibid). It attains a quality of stasis that reflects the way in which exchanged objects are assumed to be unchanging, their materiality supplanted by an abstract quantity. The shopping centre takes on this sense of time at a standstill, filled with eternal objects perversely suspended by their existence as bearers of value. Just as the architecture and atmosphere of the mall play on the liberté, égalité, and fraternité of the market in encouraging a sense of liminal possibility, they also play on this abstract time in promoting a sense of the homogeneous present.

These qualities of the Westfield come through in my fieldnotes. Travelling by train from Peckham, the shopping centre was my point of arrival within the Park for the vast majority of my fieldwork excursions. Initially it presented a bustling and layered social space that felt overwhelming to try and get to grips with, as there seemed to be no pattern to its use. As my fieldwork time went on I began to understand that this was characteristic of the space itself. Ivy, a resident of the Matchmaker's Wharf new-build apartments across the Park from the Westfield felt this same strangeness, describing is as 'Oz' and 'Wonderland' in our interview – a world apart in which time and space follow different rules.

Sohn-Rethel: 'in the market-place and in shop windows, things stand still. They

are under the spell of one activity only; to change owner' (Sohn-Rethel, 1978;

25). This spell extends itself to human activity to the extent that 'even nature herself is supposed to abstain from any ravages in the body of this commodity and to hold her breath' (ibid).

However, the suspended time of exchange is not universally dominant within the Westfield. This space is marked by social rhythm, but those rhythms are layered on top of its internal temporality. They originate elsewhere, introduced by the socially-embedded nature of the shopping centre. Christmas decorations, football World Cup screens, and holiday activities for small children all come and go, playing off the vestigial carnival of the mall, but the Westfield and the movements of its shoppers ultimately remain unchanged. Contrasting practices juxtapose other temporalities with the drifting and distracted circulation that animates the shopping centre. This represents a conflict between modes of practice and the space-times that they constitute. The suspended time that originates in the material activity of exchange is interrupted by other navigations of the Westfield's space.

The cyclical time of the Park's leisure and residential space is felt in the Westfield, cemented by the location of Stratford Station adjacent to it. The passage of commuters on their daily journey from the Park's residential areas carries a flow of people through the Westfield, filling its central walkways at twice daily rush-hours. Like the public spaces of the Park the Westfield as a leisure destination is influenced by work as a drain on people's available time, meaning that greater numbers of shoppers emerge after work and at weekends.

This tidal movement of shopping crowds introduces an undercurrent to the a-rhythmic temporality of the mall: a weekend swell and a rush-hour drag. The linear development of the Park outside the Westfield added to this sense of the Westfield as a thoroughfare, further complicating its temporality. As the public spaces of the Park opened more people used the Westfield as a conduit, cutting through crowds rather than drifting into shops.

Fig 36. The Plaza at the Westfield (Buchan Group, 2016b)

On top of this the necessary presence of retail workers, security, cleaning staff and so on means that the Westfield is always traversed by individuals whose practice is deeply determined by a linear clock time, regardless of shoppers' distraction from it. These workers move with a rhythm that marks them out from the consumers around them, completing repetitive movements between till and barcode scanner, storeroom and shelves, that breaks time down to a set of repeated gestures. This presence of activity determined by the wage and the measurement of linear time underlines the way in which the suspended

temporality of the Westfield is predicated on a dominated spatial and temporal practice, not only in its initial construction, but also in its everyday existence.

The delicate balance between domination and appropriation that the Park must maintain depends on the interweaving of these temporalities. However, it must also manage an internal contradiction in the constitution of the Westfield's abstract temporality. Sohn-Rethel characterises the time and space of

exchange as 'marked by homogeneity, continuity, and emptiness of all natural and material content, visible or invisible' (Sohn-Rethel, 1978; 25). Paralleling Lefebvre's 'concrete abstraction' of space, this time is a 'real abstraction' – a social form that is fundamentally abstract despite its genesis in and

subsumption of material practice. Sohn-Rethel is clear about the nature of this contradiction, explaining that 'in exchange, abstraction must be made from the physical nature of the commodities and from any changes that could occur to it', but at the same time 'the act of property transfer involved in the transaction is a physical act itself, consisting of real movements of material substances through time and space' (ibid; 56). This means that 'the negation of the natural and material physicality constitutes the positive reality of the abstract social physicality of the exchange processes' (ibid).

This inseparability of the concrete and the abstract reflects the relationship between domination and appropriation. Living appropriative practice makes manifest that which the domination of space seeks to secure. Within the leisure and residential spaces of the Park it is possible to witness one playing-out of this relationship, as the cyclical time of reproduction becomes subsumed to the external influence of dominated and linear abstract time. Within the Westfield we discover another temporality similarly cut across by abstract linear time, but also abstract itself due to its origin in the exchange relation. This abstract temporality nonetheless springs from a similarly appropriative practice of space.

Sohn-Rethel highlights that the abstract nature constituted in exchange 'has no existence other than in the human mind, but it does not spring from the mind' (ibid; 57).

In the mall the moral and spatio-temporal qualities of the exchange relation extend beyond their origin as social abstraction in the act of exchange, and beyond their reflection as ideal abstraction in thought, to furnish a material space with its character and atmosphere. Goss grasps this in Lefebvrian terms, suggesting that the shopping centre expresses 'a representation of space masquerading as a representational space' – 'a space conceptualised, planned scientifically and realised through strict technical control, pretending to be a space imaginatively created by its inhabitants' (Goss, 993; 40). That is, the Westfield is a dominated space that encourages a living practice which then comes to furnish a sociality of its own. This sociality, as a controlled

appropriation of space, animates the shopping centre with a sense of liminality, facilitating the realisation of value.

However, this practice stands in contradiction with the space-time it constitutes and is cut across by the cyclical rhythms of reproduction and the linear

progression of work, both of which are also essential to the reproduction of the Westfield and its functioning as a space of value realisation. The cyclical rhythms of everyday life define the reproductive activities out of which people step into the exchange space of the Westfield, to cease for a moment their own circulation as labour-power and engage in the circulation of capital and

commodities. Simultaneously, the linear tick of work time provides the

background rhythm on which the Westfield's staff work. It is to this linear time, in both its concrete and abstract existence, that I now turn as the final mode of temporalising practice that animates the Park's abstract space.