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Shopping Malls and Public Space
in Modern China
This page has been left blank intentionally
Shopping Malls and Public Space
in Modern China

Nicholas Jewell
Associate Director, Ben Adams Architects
and Tutor, Queen Mary University, London, England
© Nicholas Jewell 2015

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Nicholas Jewell has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

Published by
Ashgate Publishing Limited Ashgate Publishing Company
Wey Court East 110 Cherry Street
Union Road Suite 3-1
Farnham Burlington, VT 05401-3818
Surrey, GU9 7PT USA
England

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jewell, Nicholas.
Shopping malls and public space in modern China / By Nicholas Jewell.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4724-5611-3 (hbk) -- ISBN 978-1-4724-5612-0 (ebook) --
ISBN 978-1-4724-5613-7 (epub) 1. Shopping malls--China. 2. Public spaces--China.
3. Shopping centers--China--Planning. 4. Social change--China. I. Title.
HF5430.6.C6J494 2015
381’.110951--dc23
2015011065

ISBN: 9781472456113 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781472456120 (ebk – PDF)
ISBN: 9781472456137 (ebk – ePUB)

Printed in the United Kingdom by Henry Ling Limited,

at the Dorset Press, Dorchester, DT1 1HD
Contents

List of Illustrations vii

Acknowledgements   xi

introduction   1

1 a brief history of Malls   13

2 eastern promises   47

3 a new breed   75

4 The rub   107

5 a new day   129

6 The city reified   153

7 The bleed   179

8 going down to chinatown   201

9 conclusion   239

Bibliography   253
Index   269
This page has been left blank intentionally
List of Illustrations
1 A Brief History of Malls
1.1 A Parisian arcade in the present day.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
1.2 Approach road to Brent Cross
shopping centre, London. Image courtesy
of Nicholas Jewell.
1.3 Approach to Bluewater shopping
centre, Greenhithe, Kent. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
1.4 Mall axis at the Trafford Centre,
Manchester. Image courtesy of Nicholas
Jewell.
1.5 Bluewater shopping centre, Greenhithe,
Kent. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
1.6 Ibn Battuta shopping mall, Dubai.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
1.7 Evolution of the shopping mall plan
form. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
1.8 The curving axis within the Dubai Mall.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
1.9 South John Street, Liverpool One.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
1.10 Future Systems curved façade for
Selfridges at the Bull Ring, Birmingham.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
1.11 The world’s largest shopping malls by
square metres of gross leasable area. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2 Eastern Promises
2.1 Golden Mile complex, Singapore.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.2 Mall atrium at People’s Park, Singapore.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.3 Exterior of the People’s Park complex,
Singapore. Image courtesy of Nicholas
Jewell.
2.4 Hong Kong viewed from the Peak.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.5 Hong Kong’s mid-level escalators which
are used to tame its fierce topography.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.6 Interior of the IFC Mall, Hong Kong.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.7 High level walkway between shopping
malls, Hong Kong. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
viii Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China
2.8 Floorplan of The Landmark, Hong
Kong. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.9 Mall atrium at The Landmark, Hong
Kong. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.10 Herzog and de Meuron’s Prada store,
Tokyo. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.11 Toyo Ito’s façade for Tod’s, Tokyo.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.12 Omotesando Hills, Tokyo. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
2.13 Ramped mall atrium at Omotesando
Hills, Tokyo. Image courtesy of Nicholas
Jewell.
2.14 Stepping base to mall atrium at
Omotesando Hills, Tokyo. Image courtesy of
Craig Hutchinson.
3 A New Breed
3.1 Map of Beijing’s major metropolitan
area. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.2 Tiananmen Square, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.3 Beijing’s impassable road network.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.4 A typical scene from Beijing’s hutongs.
Image courtesy of Murray Fraser.
3.5 Oriental Plaza, Beijing. Image courtesy
of Nicholas Jewell.
3.6 Golden Resources, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.7 Shangdu SOHO, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.8 Internal signage at Shangdu SOHO,
Beijing. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.9 Piano key amphitheatre at Shangdu
SOHO, Beijing. Image courtesy of Nicholas
Jewell.
3.10 Unused open space on Jin Hui Lu,
Shangdu SOHO, Beijing. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
3.11 Sanlitun Village, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.12 Sanlitun Village South floorplans.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.13 Blurring of boundaries between open
space and mall interior at Sanlitun Village,
Beijing. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.14 Tianzifang, Shanghai. Image courtesy
of Nicholas Jewell.
3.15 Xintiandi, Shanghai. Image courtesy
of Nicholas Jewell.
3.16 Atrium at the Superbrand Mall,
Shanghai. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
3.17 Diagram of the three-dimensional
movement patterns and tethers within
the new breed of Chinese shopping malls.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
4 The Rub
4.1 Largest 25 shopping malls in the world
by gross leasable area in square metres.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
4.2 Total area in square metres for the
largest 25 shopping malls in the world.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
4.3 Number of operating shop units in
the largest 25 shopping malls in the world.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
4.4 Central plaza at the South China Mall,
Dongguan. Image courtesy of Nicholas
Jewell.
4.5 Internal rollercoaster at the South
China Mall, Dongguan. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
 List of Illustrations
4.6 Desolate open area at the South
China Mall, Dongguan. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
4.7 Ghostly internal malls at the South
China Mall, Dongguan. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
4.8 Empty internal spaces at the South
China Mall, Dongguan. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
4.9 Deserted ‘Venetian’ canals at the South
China Mall, Dongguan. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
4.10 The empty city of New Ordos in the
autonomous region of Inner Mongolia.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
4.11 Ghostly internal malls at the South
China Mall, Dongguan. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
5 A New Day
5.1 Plaza 66 atrium, Shanghai. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
5.2 Huge scale of Louis Vuitton suitcase
at Plaza 66, Shanghai. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
5.3 Distant view of Louis Vuitton suitcase
at Plaza 66, Shanghai. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
5.4 Sectional diagram illustrating the
separate spheres of consumption within
Plaza 66. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
5.5 The above ground mall at IFC Pudong,
Shanghai. Image courtesy of Nicholas
Jewell.
5.6 The below ground mall at IFC Pudong,
Shanghai. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
5.7 A sunken plaza dominated by a
totemic Apple symbol forms a consumptive
ix
hinge at IFC Pudong, Shanghai. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
5.8 Sectional diagram of IFC Pudong
illustrating its separate malls and
consumptive hinge. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
5.9 A two storey Apple sign dominates
the low rise street vistas around Sanlitun
Village, Beijing. Image courtesy of Nicholas
Jewell.
5.10 A two storey Apple sign dominates
the main square at Sanlitun Village, Beijing.
6 The City Reified
6.1 Qianmen Street, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
6.2 Nanluoguxiang, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
6.3 Aggregation of programme at
Shangdu SOHO, Beijing. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
6.4 Shangdu SOHO, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
6.5 Elements viewed from across Victoria
Harbour, Hong Kong. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
6.6 Huge scale of Elements, Hong Kong.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
6.7 Elements internal floorplans. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
6.8 Jianwei SOHO, Beijing. Image courtesy
of Nicholas Jewell.
6.9 The location of shopping malls in
Beijing’s central business district and a 1
kilometre radius of movement around each,
illustrating the overlapping segmentarity
that reifies their social constructions. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
x Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China
6.10 Sanlitun SOHO, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
6.11 Xidan Joy City, Beijing. Image courtesy
of Nicholas Jewell.
7 The Bleed
7.1 Atrium at Dongzhimen Raffles City,
Beijing. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
7.2 Shanghai regulations for visiting parks
(note the prohibition of ‘mental’ patients).
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
7.3 Shanghai old town. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
7.4 Urban disjuncture, Shanghai. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
7.5 Wangfujing, home to Beijing’s art
‘grifters’. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
7.6 Cycling in the South China Mall,
Dongguan. Image courtesy of Nicholas
Jewell.
8 Going Down to Chinatown
8.1 Xintiandi, Shanghai. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
8.2 Beijing airport terminal. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.3 Bird’s Nest Stadium, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.4 CCTV headquarters, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.5 The ‘Crystal Lotus’ at Dongzhimen
Raffles City, Beijing. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
8.6 IFC Pudong, Shanghai. Image courtesy
of Nicholas Jewell.
8.7 Golden Resources, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.8 Hong Kong Square, Shanghai. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.9 Galaxy SOHO, Beijing. Image courtesy
of Murray Fraser.
8.10 APM, Hong Kong. Image courtesy of
Nicholas Jewell.
8.11 Dongzhimen Raffles City, Beijing.
Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.12 Sanlitun SOHO, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.13 Guanghuala SOHO, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.14 Elements, Hong Kong. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.15 Xidan Joy City, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.16 Hong Kong Square, Shanghai. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.17 Shangdu SOHO, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.18 Shangdu SOHO, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
8.19 Guanghuala SOHO, Beijing. Image
courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
9 Conclusion
9.1 Vanke Super City. Image courtesy of
Spark Architects.
Acknowledgements

A great number of people have helped me in so many ways over the lifespan of
this work. First and foremost, none of this would have been possible without the
help of Murray Fraser who supervised the PhD from which this book has been
developed. His advice, friendship and support have continually gone above and
beyond the needs of tuition.
I would also like to thank Adrian Forty, Ben Stringer, Adam Eldridge and
Harriet Evans whose input has played a hugely important role in the life of this
work. Similarly, I would like to thank Kim Dovey and Fulong Wu who contributed
generous and enlightening observations that have helped to shape this book into
its final form.
Sven Steiner was instrumental in persuading me that this was an endeavour
worth undertaking and, along with his colleagues at Spark Architects – Jan
Felix Closterman, Mingyin Tan, Kamilla Czegi and Sophia David – provided great
hospitality and a number of key insights during my fieldwork China. Similarly, Conn
Yuen was indispensable during my time in Hong Kong, while Stephen Cairns, Lillian
Chee and Widari Bahrin ensured a memorable stay in Singapore. Zhang Jie, Jianfei
Zhu, Simon Blore, Damienne Joly Hung, Paul Sutliff and Chris Hacking were all
generous with their time and insights.
This work has been conducted in parallel with my other life as a practising
architect and, as such, I must thank Ben Adams Architects for their support and
understanding over its lifespan – particularly during the final stages.
Many friends and colleagues have provided support by commenting on sections
of text, providing ideas, or simply being around for support when the going
got tough. I would like to thank: Lincoln Andrews, Stephen Bell, Eva Branscome,
Alex Dowdeswell, Kim Gilchrist, Patrick Hammond, Julia Hamson, Ian and Lucy
Hannent, Lucas Hewett, Ali Higgins, Craig Hutchinson, Kate Jordan, Michael Wilson
Katsibas, Kayvahn Kavoussi, Amy McCarthy, Richard McCarthy, Alastair and Helen
Pope, Andy and Colette Reader, Maeve Rutten, Patrick Seymour, Ajay Sood, Anna
Steinberg, Neil Sterling, Marisa Wheatley, Kielan Yarrow and Colleen Yuen. I would
xii Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China

also like to say particular thanks to Sophie Steed who walked many miles and read
many words.
Above all I must thank those that are the centre of my world – Sara, Mum, Ben,
Bella, Oliver and my grandfather Geoffrey. Your love and support has been with me
every step of the way.
My grandmother Irene, my uncle Malcolm and my aunt Tina were lost along the
way and are terribly missed.
Finally, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my father, Paul
William Seymour Jewell, with whom I shared more beautiful memories than I could
ever put into words.
Introduction

THE ELEPHANt IN tHE ROOM

‘Do you like shopping malls?’ I have encountered this question more than any other
over the course of writing this book. It is one that I would like you to ask yourself also.
How do you define your relationship with the shopping mall? For my interrogators
I suspect that their line of enquiry was a cunning ruse, a way to navigate straight
to the big revelation and avoid the turgid explanations in between. Moreover, this
question cuts to the nub of the love-hate relationship between modernity and
the shopping mall. Who can deny the convenience of the mall and its ubiquity in
everyday life? But who, in the rarefied fields of architecture and academia, truly
loves it?
I have no desire to make you wait for a denouement that will disappoint. The
answer, at its most fundamental level, is no, I don’t really like shopping malls. As an
architect, any latent joie de vivre associated with being in a shopping mall has been
bludgeoned into oblivion by seven years of training in the art of wearing black
and the correct use of right angles. Consumption and capitalism contrast starkly
with the quasi-socialist value system that generally informs architecture’s agenda
of good intentions. You may ask what kind of perverse imagination would taunt
itself for half a decade by studying an object of architectural derision. My answer
is that I find the shopping mall genuinely interesting because, as an architectural
form, it is so problematic. It asks architecture questions that the profession would
prefer to ignore.
Life is of course rarely black or white. Yet the relationship between the
architectural profession and the shopping mall has been polarized along such
lines for half a century. A high-low cultural divide is commonly acknowledged
throughout the profession. High cultural institutions and one-off showpieces
conventionally occupy the oeuvre of architecture’s great and good. From there, it is
a slippery slope into a morass of commercially oriented building ventures. And then
the shopping mall appears to occupy the landfill at the very bottom. As a result the
typology, for architects at least, has found itself in a catch-22 scenario. If opposed
2 Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China

value systems make the shopping mall an entity that is difficult to talk about, cultural
snobbishness has fortified the profession against sustained experimentation with
its architectural form. Research has similarly failed to provide much meaningful
insight into shopping mall design. Writers have tended towards a limited selection
of pigeonholes. Historical lineage occupies the work of Longstreth and others.1
Semiotic awe overrides the work of Baudrillard and Kowinski.2 Formerly edgy
writer/practitioners such as Rem Koolhaas occupy themselves with superficial
attempts to use malls for defining the zeitgeist.3 Least helpful of all, writers such
as Betsky resort to outright dismissal.4 Each of these examples displays, in different
ways, the failure of architects to harness the shopping mall as the locus of social
production that its scale and programme so clearly imply. Architects, it would
seem, need to broaden their conception of what culture is.5
Broader theoretical enquiries into urban morphologies and power structures
have yielded more interesting perspectives on the shopping mall.6 These, however,
tend to treat the mall as part of a larger field of enquiry into consumerist society
and as a result do not provide a complete typological picture. Beyond architecture,
social sciences have asked some more taxing questions of the mall typology.7 I
have also written elsewhere on Britain’s suburban shopping malls in an effort to
establish a more relevant existential base for their theoretical exploration.8
Pertinent or impertinent as they may be, these academic enquiries deal with
a particular historical condition. They explore the shopping mall as an essentially
suburban entity. As such, it is seen as having provided a focused hub of amenity
in the sprawl of post-war suburban growth. As a result of its autonomous form in
this setting, the shopping mall has been naively likened to a modern-day agora,
or to a cathedral of consumption. Such analogies speak of a ‘place for the people’.
But the business of selling has a tendency to strip the people of all but their most
immanently empirical characteristics. In this way the shopping mall separates
itself from forbearers that occupy more conventional histories. Its agora is blighted
by aporia.
Despite its unquestionable popularity, the suburban shopping mall is now on its
way out. Widely discredited in Europe and the USA as the slayer of the high street,
the shopping mall had seemingly reached its logical limits with the end of the out-
of-town boom. Extinction did not follow architecture’s ignorance of the elephant
in the room, however. The rejection of the out-of-town model and the explosion
of internet retailing offered the shopping mall a simple choice – evolve or die.9 It
clearly chose the former. As many Western cities now attempt to undergo an urban
renaissance, the shopping mall has ingratiated itself back into their historic cores as
a constituent of regeneration. Far from disappearing into the annals of history, the
shopping mall is here to stay. Furthermore, its change of location from suburb to
city centre casts a spotlight on the often complex, but suppressed, social tapestry
that weaves through the shopping mall eco-system. Accordingly, this new urban
condition must be acknowledged and a different set of questions developed to
address the architectural and existential relevance of this context.
In this rebirth there is, however, a missing history of cultural hybridity, which this
thesis will explore. Modern metropolitan shopping malls may still be something
Introduction 3

of a novelty in Western climes, but in other parts of the world they have acted as
an urban cornerstone for some time. Nowhere exemplifies this trait more than
contemporary China. The shopping mall has been central to its urban revolution
over the past 35 years. Its import must be understood. To truly grasp the local, a
global, culturally hybrid, perspective must be adopted, and this is why this book
focuses squarely on what has been happening in China.

The Wild East

China’s appeal to the world’s imagination is easy to understand. Yet, as an object of

Western wonder, it is often misunderstood. Much of this misapprehension stems
from so much having taken place in so little time. Since 1978, China has occupied
itself with carrying out the largest urban expansion in world history. For the world
of architecture, this has presented hitherto unimaginable opportunities. Architects
and commentators have preoccupied themselves with reflecting this emerging
urban condition. Yet to truly grasp the nettle, however, a longer timeline is required.
For much of the last 200 years China’s destiny has been shaped by its exposure
to the wider world. The real tipping point was the 1839 Opium War. This was the
moment at which tensions with international trade – tensions born of the Middle
Kingdom’s hermetic pursuit of autonomy – transformed into outright aggression.
From this juncture, China experienced a century of subjugation at the hands of
competing colonial powers, which culminated in expansionist Japanese aggression
during the Second World War. Japan was eventually ousted by an uneasy alliance
between China’s Nationalist and Communist parties. A four-year civil war followed.
The Communist Party prevailed and in 1949 Chairman Mao Zedong founded the
People’s Republic of China.10 Mao’s Communism was far from liberating, however.
Over the next three decades China progressively withdrew from the world. Isolation
led to widespread famines and ideological purges11 which ensured that by:

1975 – the nadir in well over a thousand years of economic history – Chinese
earned on average just 7.5% of the income of Western Europeans.12

Mao had already realized as much, and from 1971 had been in dialogue with the
United States of America about China’s re-entry into global affairs.13 His death in
1976 meant that he did not see the realization of this switch in policy. It was Mao’s
successor, Deng Xiaoping, who reopened China’s doors in 1978, and is widely seen
as the architect of its meteoric rise to today’s position of global pre-eminence.14
Deng had lived through China’s all-time lows. If these had resulted from Chinese
obstinacy in the face of globalizing currents, he now realized that China’s future
must grasp the obverse face of this historical coin. Modern China has harnessed
this opening up with seemingly unbridled abandon.
Longer and more complete histories are available elsewhere, so I will not repeat
them. Rather, this brief exposition provides some context to the China that will
now be under discussion. Its recent history has been equally tumultuous. But the
4 Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China

trajectory has been largely upwards. China, desperate to escape the historical mire
into which it had fallen, has been playing catch-up in rapid fashion. In this period,
it has concertinaed a process of economic development that took over 200 years
in the Western world. Accordingly, its urban landscape resembles a bewildering
potpourri of conditions. Hyper-modernity and antiquity nestle side by side, as do
opulence and poverty. Development is constant. The territory outdates the map
before it can even be drawn.
Much commentary, and architectural production for that matter, appears to be
seduced by the speed and scale of this condition.15 For example Nancy Lin, under
the umbrella of the Masters programme run by Rem Koolhaas at Harvard, has
described how ‘architectural design is produced ten times faster in China than in
the US’.16 But for all their romanticism of modern China’s flux, these commentaries
rarely leave one feeling less baffled at their conclusion. Furthermore, they infer an
idea of Chinese development that is wilful and chaotic. On the ground this may,
at times, appear to be an inviolable criterion of the Chinese urban experience, but
the reality is far from the case. Overseeing all is the panoptic eye of the one-party
state and its development mantra of: ‘Socialism with Chinese characteristics’. Deng
Xiaoping outlined its aims succinctly:

Socialism means eliminating poverty. Pauperism is not socialism, still less

communism. The superiority of the socialist system lies above all in its ability
to develop the productive forces and to improve the people’s material and
cultural life.17

China’s social landscape – and the architectural forms through which it is lived
and represented – is instrumentally guided by the state. Its built environment is
no accident. Architecture both guides, and is the product of, this developmental
imperative. If the shopping mall is now a keystone of Chinese ‘public’ space, it is
riven with the seeds of China’s future and the tensions embodied in its ongoing
evolution. As such, it offers the possibility of a more nuanced understanding of
China’s architectural modernity and, in turn, a richer set of ideas about what a
shopping mall may be.

Plan of Work

My enquiry, therefore, occupies an intersection. As an urban entity in China,

the shopping mall is forced to make connections above and beyond those that
are considered intrinsic to its more customary situation in Western suburbia. In
embracing the complexity of the Chinese urban condition have new spatial and
programmatic characteristics evolved within the typology, and do these serve
its betterment? Transposition out of its Western comfort zone also provides an
opportunity to evaluate the mall’s typological relevance in a set of specific socio-
cultural conditions that fascinate the global architectural community at large. To
explore this transposition therefore requires a balancing act, between hermetic
concerns that are specific to the shopping mall typology and broader questions
Introduction 5

concerning urban conditions and architectural production in China as a whole.

Moreover, these enquiries are circumscribed by a key question – whether this
book reads the shopping mall through China, or China through the shopping
mall. Inevitably, the answer will be something of both – the relationship between
China and the shopping mall will interweave with multiple, changing emphases
as different facets of its being are explored. Nonetheless, the shopping mall sets a
conceptual and physical limit to my reading of China. This is deliberate. There are,
already, far too many Western authored theses that attempt to grapple with China
as a totality.18 Inevitably, generalization replaces genuine insight and such enquiries
often stumble when confronted with fundamentally alien cultural practices. The
best work acknowledges these limits.19 The worst,20 however, descends into well-
worn tropes of orientalist arrogance that have been long maligned by Bhabha, Said
and others.21
For me, the shopping mall is an agent that allows me to enter a complex culture
that is not my own; it allows me to attain a degree of understanding of that culture.
An appreciation of the shopping mall in a Western context is the platform from
which its degrees of difference in a Chinese situation can be understood. It presents
both a limit and a benchmark. A conceptual limit must not throttle the scope of
enquiry at hand, however. The forces and relations of production shaping modern
China’s pseudo-capitalist spatiality reach into many areas of its social composition.
The form that my investigative structure takes must therefore acknowledge and
make room for the exploration of these attributes.
Although China is the primary focus of this study, it is also important to
acknowledge that any discussion of China, and the shopping mall for that matter,
intersects with global concerns. If China now ‘shakes the world’22 it is equally
the case – as the preceding brief history illustrated – that is has been shaken by
the world. This speaks of a pre-condition and post-condition, both of which are
culturally hybridized: the former by the imposition of colonial occupation, the
latter by China’s increasing global preeminence. Viewed in parallel with the picture
of the shopping mall afforded by this intersection, these pre-conditions and
post-conditions assume vital importance to the construction of a more informed
critical history that concerns the typology as a whole. Accordingly, this study will
contextualize matters by looking at the shopping mall’s pre-conditions in the USA,
Britain, Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan to understand the factors that have
influenced its hybrid form on the Chinese mainland. From here, the development
of a distinctly Chinese shopping mall will be explored. This exploration will
conclude with a discussion of post-conditions that may result in the future via the
export of this hybrid typology into the milieu of modern, global shopping mall
development. Therefore, while a significant portion of this book will discuss global
issues, its aim is always to further a more nuanced understanding of the shopping
mall in the context of China.
Stuart Hall’s essay, ‘Encoding, Decoding’, provides a number of useful cues,
describing the circulation of globalized media as:

a structure produced and sustained through the articulation of linked but

distinctive moments – production, circulation, distribution, consumption,
6 Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China

reproduction. This would be to think of the process as a ‘complex structure in

dominance’, sustained through the articulation of connected practices, each of
which, however, retains its distinctiveness and has its own specific modality, its
own forms and conditions of existence.23

Transposed to the mall, whose socio-spatial framework and re-contextualization

within the Chinese heartland echo this ‘complex structure in dominance’ a
critical analysis that parallels Hall’s framework is proposed. Broadly speaking, Its
concerns also coincide with the perceived/conceived/lived trialectic pioneered by
Lefebvre.24 By defining these ‘moments’ and exploring the discursive relationship
between them, this critical framework will allow us to dematerialize the invariance
of built form. The following nine chapters will thus comprise an interdisciplinary
investigation through which the Chinese shopping mall can be deconstructed. It is
worth describing this structure in a little more detail.
Chapter 1, ‘A Brief History of Malls’, is, more accurately, a critique of the shopping
mall’s history. Its purpose is to set the theoretical tone by digging beneath the
surface of more conventional histories to get to the root of the more fundamental
factors behind the shopping mall’s architectural production. As such, it as much
historical critique as it is history. Drawing on my own previous research25 I identify
the spatial characteristics that have ensured the Western shopping mall’s longevity.
Employing various spatial and social theories, I explain what these architectural
devices mean for the shopping mall’s existential constructs.26 These will be the
benchmarks against which the dimensions of difference inherent in the Chinese
shopping mall can be measured.
Chapter 2, ‘Eastern Promises’, explores the locations within which architectural
production of the hybrid shopping mall now prevalent in urban China initially
took place. Accordingly a number of Asian antecedents to the Chinese mall are
discussed. Assimilations of metabolist theories in Singapore,27 adaptations to the
challenging topography of Hong Kong, and Tadao Ando’s concrete austerity in
Tokyo form the basis of this investigation.
Chapter 3, ‘A New Breed’, turns to the production of the Chinese shopping
mall itself. China’s extant urban conditions are initially discussed as a means of
understanding the more generalized spatial conditions that have acted as a
precursor to the shopping mall’s integration into its metropolitan cores.28 From
here I turn to the identification of the spatial characteristics that define the Chinese
mall typology.
Chapter 4, ‘The Rub’, discusses the shopping mall’s circulation as a totem of
China’s economic potency. In particular, this chapter explores how divergences
between the communist and capitalist ideologies that guide China’s development
attempt a degree of resolution in the space of the shopping mall. The erasure
of China’s past in service of its future will be explored through the spaces of
Dongguan’s South China Mall – the most plausible contender for the title of the
largest shopping mall in the world.29 This edifice of consumption also suffers the
ignominy of being one of the world’s most spectacular real-estate failures.30 Its near
total vacancy reveals a number of fissures in the forces and relations of production
Introduction 7

that have underpinned China’s rise. Accordingly, its investigation may reveal more
clearly the value systems that guide the one-party state.
Chapter 5, ‘A New Day’, moves the discussion to Chinese shopping malls where
business is truly booming. Here, circulation and distribution of the Communist
Party’s message becomes spatialized. The unique characteristics of these spaces
are bound to pivotal moments in China’s growth and the tensions it experiences
with competing economic powers.31 Moreover, its all-pervasive urban presence is
discussed as the basis for articulating an emergent Chinese class structure.32
Chapter 6, ‘The City Reified’, looks at the spatialization of China’s nascent class
structure throughout the whole urban field. The shopping mall can be seen here
as a key agent for the distribution of this ideological web. Changing conceptions
of China’s gated33 urban formations are explored through the shopping mall’s
segmentary structure.34 This scenario, in turn, implies the creation of distinct spatial
networks35 formed on the basis of class lines. Is the right to the contemporary
Chinese city based solely on ones ability to consume?
Chapter 7, ‘The Bleed’, explores the lived dimensions of the Chinese shopping
mall – the means by which it is consumed by its users. Aberrant behavior is the
dominant object of analysis here. In identifying where the mall fails to follow a
pre-programmed agenda of consumption, the potential for a broader cultural
orientation is possible. A disturbing branch of insubordination has manifested itself
in acts of suicide that have exercised a particular kind of architectural violence36
on China’s shopping mall atriums. These acts reveal the anomic tension37 that
characterizes inhabitation of the Chinese shopping mall for many. They also spur a
more in-depth exploration of the many other lived dimensions of the mall.
Chapter 8, ‘Going Down to Chinatown’, discusses architectural form itself
as an object of consumption. An initial exploration of the broader landscape
of architectural production in China establishes a framework within which the
architectural language of the hybrid shopping mall can be contextualized. By
looking at the ephemeral, affective surface language of the Chinese shopping
mall, its aspirational dimensions can be understood as a broader reflection of
currents that inform an emergent urban vernacular. Tensions between modern
and nostalgic architectural representations are explored through the post-modern
tropes that more conventionally blight the shopping mall.38 The meaning of this
affective language is ultimately cast as a filter that informs attitudes to China’s
environmental and social conditions.
To conclude, I review the salient points gleaned from the previous chapters.
From this vantage point I discuss the relevance of the Chinese shopping mall’s
culturally hybrid architectural forms in global and local city production. Finally,
I propose further streams of critical thought and practice that will hopefully
promote more productive readings of the shopping mall typology both in China
and at a global level.
Identification of the nodes at which the Chinese shopping mall’s planning and
design characteristics are strongest is fundamental to this analysis. Similarly, these
sites provide scope to explore the tensions between China’s socialist/communist
political framework and its exposure to the impetus of globalization. The focal
8 Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China

points of China’s opening up and the development of what Cook describes as

the ‘internationalized metropolis’,39 offer the most fruitful areas for study. Beijing,
Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta will thus provide geographical focus; each
having boasted the location of the world’s largest shopping mall at some point
since the turn of the millennium.
Beijing will occupy centre-stage. As the seat of political power it provides an
opportunity to evaluate the urban shopping mall in the heart of China’s socialist
market economy. Beijing’s historic city plan represented an idealized Chinese
metropolis and enshrined many important ideas about urban space.40 The impact
of these ideas on the Chinese psyche41 plays an important part in understanding
the widespread adoption of the shopping mall in this part of the world. Beijing
remains the fulcrum around which China experiments with the future of its society.
Shanghai was, for centuries, the centre of global trade in mainland China. As
a result of the internationalization that this status brought, Shanghai has often
been considered ‘ahead’ of other Chinese cities. Does Shanghai therefore reflect
the cutting edge of shopping mall design in China? Or does its prominence on the
global stage result in the internationalized homogenization of urban space?
The Pearl River Delta and its special economic zone is defined by a symbiotic
relationship between the former colonial territory of Hong Kong and the
manufacturing hubs of Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan. It brings China’s
seemingly polarized facets of production and consumption into close proximity
and asks some awkward questions of the shopping mall’s societal relevance in
this context.
A study of the shopping mall in contemporary China presents an opportunity to
provide meaningful insight into a much-maligned building typology. Evolution, in
terms of this architectural form, has taken place in little over 50 years – as opposed
to the centuries, even millennia, of trial-and-error evolution that have defined
most of the building classifications we take for granted today. Much architectural
criticism of the shopping mall fails to find a vocabulary that is able to address the
levels of meaning implicit within its built manifestations. Yet the shopping mall
endures. To remain a relevant social art architecture must foster a more holistic
understanding of this phenomenon. This is a necessary and integral part of the
process of adapting to globalizing forces. An investigation of Chinese malls offers
an excellent case study, indeed a microcosm, of what is happening in all our
cities today.

notes

1 See: Longstreth, Richard, City Centre to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and
Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920–1950 (London: The MIT Press, 1997); Wall, Alex, Victor
Gruen: From Urban Shop to New City (Barcelona: Actar, 2005).
2 See: Baudrillard, Jean, The Consumer Society: Myths and Structures (London: Sage
Publications, 1970); Kowinski, Wiliam Severini, The Malling of America: Travels in the
United States of Shopping (Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 1985).
Introduction 9

3 See: Koolhaas, Rem (ed.), Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping (Koln: Taschen
GmbH, 2001).
4 See: Betsky, Aaron and Adigard, Erik, Architecture Must Burn: A Manifesto for an
Architecture Beyond Building (London: Thames & Hudson, 2000), p. 7.
5 See: Lury, Celia, Consumer Culture (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996).
6 See: Dovey, Kim, Framing Places: Mediating Power in Built Form (London: Routledge,
1999); Shane, David Grahame, Recombinant Urbanism: Conceptual Modeling in
Architecture, Urban Design, and City Theory (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 2005);
Shane, David Grahame, Urban Design Since 1945 – A Global Perspective (Chichester:
John Wiley and Sons, 2011).
7 See: Miller, Daniel, A Theory of Shopping (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998); Miller,
Daniel, Jackson, Peter, Thrift, Nigel, Holbrook, Beverley and Rowlands, Michael,
Shopping, Place and Identity (London: Routledge, 1998); Morris, Meaghan, ‘Things to
do with shopping centres’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader: Second
Edition (Routledge; London, 1999), pp. 391–409.
8 See: Jewell, Nicholas, ‘The fall and rise of the British mall’, The Journal of Architecture,
Volume 6, Winter 2001, pp. 317–78.
9 See: Ibrahim, Ibrahim, ‘Revisiting the shopping mall: Building shopping centres as
traditional retail outlets needs a re-think’. Management Thinking, March 4, 2013.
Available at: http://www.management-thinking.org/content/revisiting-shopping-mall
[accessed March 31, 2013].
10 See: Spence, Jonathan D., The Search for Modern China, Second Edition (New York:
W. W. Norton and Company, 1999).
11 See: Dikotter, Frank, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating
Catastrophe, 1958–62 (London: Bloomsbury, 2010); Pan, Philip, Out of Mao’s Shadow:
The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (London: Picador, 2009).
12 Kynge, James, China Shakes the World: The Rise of a Hungry Nation (London: Phoenix/
Orion Books Ltd, 2007).
13 See: Kissinger, Henry, On China (London: Penguin, 2012).
14 See: Harvey, David, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2005); Hewitt, Duncan, Getting Rich First: Life in a Changing China (London: Vintage/The
Random House Group Ltd, 2007).
15 See: Hewitt, Getting Rich First; Hornsby, Adrian and Mars, Neville (eds), The Chinese
Dream: A Society Under Construction (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2008); Koolhaas,
Rem (ed.), The Great Leap Forward (Koln: Taschen GmbH, 2001); Kynge, China Shakes
the World.
16 Lin, Nancy, ‘Architecture, Shenzhen’, in Rem Koolhaas (ed.), The Great Leap Forward
(Taschen GmbH; Koln, 2001), p. 161.
17 Xiaoping, Deng, quoted in John Bryan Starr, Understanding China, Second Edition
(London: Profile Books Ltd, 2001), p. 72.
18 See: Hewitt, Getting Rich First; Hornsby and Mars, The Chinese Dream; Kynge, China
Shakes the World; Leach, Neil, China (Hong Kong: Map Book Publishers, 2004).
19 See: Hassenpflug, Dieter, The Urban Code of China (Basel: Birkhauser GmbH, 2010).
20 See: Hornsby and Mars, The Chinese Dream; Leach, China.
10 Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China

21 See: Bhabha, Homi K., The Location of Culture (Oxon: Routledge, 1994); Said, Edward W.,
Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993); Said, Edward W., Orientalism (London:
Penguin Books, 2003).
22 See: Kynge, China Shakes the World.
23 Hall, Stuart, ‘Encoding, decoding’, in Simon During (ed.), The Cultural Studies Reader:
Second Edition (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 508.
24 See: Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, trans. Smith, Donald Nicholson (Malden,
MA: Blackwell, 1991); Soja, Edward W., Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other
Real-and-Imagined Places (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996).
25 See: Jewell, The Fall and Rise of the British Mall.
26 See: Benjamin, Walter, The Arcades Project (London: Harvard University Press, 2004);
Colomina, Beatriz, Privacy and Publicity: Modern Architecture as Mass Media (London
and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1995); De Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday
Life (Berkley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1988); Deleuze, Gilles
and Guattari, Felix, A Thousand Plateaus (London: Continuum, 2004); Dovey, Kim,
Becoming Places: Urbanism/Architecture/Identity/Power (London: Routledge, 2009);
Dovey, Framing Places; Hillier, Bill, Space is the Machine (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); Klein, Naomi, No Logo (London: Harper Collins Publishers,
2000); Miller, A Theory of Shopping; Sennett, Richard, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the
City in Western Civilization (London: Faber and Faber, 1994).
27 See: Koolhaas, Rem, S,M,L,XL (Rotterdam/New York: 010 Publishers/Monacelli,
1995); Maki, Fumihiko, Investigations in Collective Form (St. Louis, MO: Washington
University, 1964).
28 See: Bray, David, Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from
Origins to Reform (California, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005); Zha, Jianying, China
Pop: How Soap Operas, Tabloids and Bestsellers are Transforming a Culture (New York:
The New York Press, 1995); Zhu, Jianfei, Chinese Spatial Strategies: Imperial Beijing
1420–1911 (London: Routledge, 2004).
29 See: ‘List of largest shopping malls in the world’. Wikipedia. Available at: http://
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_world%27s_largest_shopping_malls#List_of_the_
world.27s_largest_shopping_malls [accessed January 12, 2011].
30 See: Donohoe, Michael, ‘Mall of misfortune’. The National, Thursday June 12, 2008.
Available at: http://www.thenational.ae/article/20080612/REVIEW/206990272/1042
[accessed January 9, 2011].
31 See: Rein, Shaun, The End of Cheap China: Economic and Cultural Trends That Will Disrupt
the World (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2012).
32 See: Lash, Scott and Urry, John, The End of Organized Capitalism (Cambridge/Oxford:
Polity Press/Blackwell Publishers, 1987).
33 See: Atkinson, Rowland and Blandy, Sarah (eds), Gated Communities (Oxon: Routledge,
2006); King, Anthony D. (ed.), Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity
(Oxon: Routledge, 2004).
34 See: Dovey, Becoming Places.
35 See: Shane, Recombinant Urbanism.
36 See: Tschumi, Bernard, Architecture and Disjunction (London and Cambridge, MA: The
MIT Press, 1996).
Introduction 11

37 See: Durkheim, Emile, Suicide (Oxon: Routledge, 2006); Perry, Elizabeth J. and Selden,
Mark (eds), Chinese Society, 2nd Edition: Change, Conflict and Resistance (Oxon:
Routledge/Curzon, 2003).
38 See: Harvey, David, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry Into the Origins
of Cultural Change (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1990); Jameson, Frederic,
Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991).
39 See: Cook, Ian G., ‘Beijing as an “Internationalized Metropolis”’, in Fulong Wu (ed.),
Globalization and the Chinese City (Oxon: Routledge, 2006), pp. 63–5.
40 See: Zhu, Chinese Spatial Strategies.
41 See: King, Spaces of Global Cultures; Zha, China Pop.
This page has been left blank intentionally
1
A Brief History of Malls

Beginnings are the bane of the writer. And histories are blighted by the spectre of
fiction. Furthermore, an edifice of bewilderment surrounds architectural histories
of the shopping mall. Where, then, may I begin?

Just as Proust begins the story of his life with an awakening, so must every
presentation of history begin with awakening; in fact, it should treat of
nothing else.1

For Walter Benjamin, the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris were a medium whose
exploration would awaken a dreaming collective.2 His intention, sadly unrealized,
was a historical-materialist expose of the socio-spatial and subjective psychological
conditions of nineteenth-century capitalism. Benjamin sought to unravel what he
saw as a crisis of historical representation – one that had channeled the myth of
progress as a means of legitimating the advance of high capitalism.

The concept of progress had to run counter to the critical theory of history
from the moment it ceased to be applied as a criterion to specific historical
developments and instead was required to measure the span between a
legendary inception and a legendary end of history. In other words; as soon as it
becomes the signature of historical process as a whole, the concept of progress
bespeaks an uncritical hypostatization rather than a critical interrogation.3

Time’s passage has done little to dampen the imperative of treating Benjamin’s
original expose as a starting point, this time for the construction of a brief, critical,
history of the shopping mall. Not only does the shopping mall represent a direct
typological evolution of the Parisian arcade. Its titular position, at the forefront of
globalized capital’s unrelenting march, also masks the more unsavoury facets of
the ‘free’ market – manifest inequality, cynical profiteering and transient fashions –
beneath the banner of progress. The endeavor of this opening chapter is thus an
exegesis of the shopping mall’s historical advance over the late-twentieth and
early-twenty-first centuries.
1.1 A Parisian arcade in the present day. Image courtesy of Nicholas Jewell.
 A Brief History of Malls 15

IS THiS HiStORY?

What do we mean when we use the words ‘shopping mall’? When did these words
first attain significance in describing the man-made landscape of modernity?

shopping mall n – a large enclosed shopping centre.

shopping centre n – a complex of stores, restaurants and sometimes banks,

usually under the same roof.4

The difficulty with definitions as open-ended as those given above is understanding

just when, historically, the shopping mall entered the modern psyche. Any number
of antecedents can be identified, ranging from citations of the seventh-century
Damascene Souq Al Hamdia as the first shopping mall, to more recent nineteenth-
century examples such as London’s Burlington Arcade or Milan’s Galleria Vittorio
Emanuele II.5 Spatial qualities displayed in the nineteenth-century Parisian arcade
also inform this typological lineage. Gilloch, for instance, notes that:

the construction of the arcade involved a particular alteration – or, rather,

invasion – of space: the street, that which is exterior to the building, became
interiorized, was made part of the building itself.6

This statement is as true of the modern shopping mall as the objects of Walter
Benjamin’s analysis. The danger of such ‘linear’ histories, however, is that they
become bogged down in minutiae. More meaningful illuminations can be lost.
Rather, my starting point is the location in which the shopping mall took definitive
shape – in the car-borne suburbia of North America in the middle of the twentieth-
century. Even here, there were a number of antecedents to the ‘real thing’. Richard
Longstreth provides one of the most complete accounts of this experimental
condition. His work faithfully records the prototypical architectural forms that
emerged within the early-twentieth century sprawl of Los Angeles. These shaped
the modern American landscape, and included a number of early experiments with
the shopping mall.7 The decisive shift, however, was realized in Detroit, ‘Motor City
USA’, and has defined the paradigm ever since.

The origins of the covered shopping mall as a building type can be traced back
to the early 1950s and specifically to the Northland Shopping Centre, Detroit
(completed 1954) by Victor Gruen. Situated on the outskirts of the city, the centre
was designed almost exclusively for the car owning public. The inward-looking
complex sits in a sea of car parking – a self-contained shopping city divorced
from any urban context. The type proved to be so successful that it quickly
became the norm for large scale shopping developments all over the USA, with
ultimately disastrous consequences for the social and economic wellbeing of
American cities.8

Considered in this sense, the shopping mall represents one of the most recent
additions to the lexicon of built forms that constitute a sense of formal order in the
modern, man-made landscape of Western capitalist societies. In 1950s America, its
16 Shopping Malls and Public Space in Modern China

early development is largely attributable to a single architect, the Austrian émigré

architect Victor Gruen.9 He saw that the motorcar was ‘the means by which the last
vestige of community coherence was destroyed’.10 Yet he also understood that the
car was a necessity for modern living. More than anyone, he saw the shopping mall
as the means to provide America’s car-borne suburban population with some of
the benefits and amenities of urban life. Gruen described the mall as:

a place that not only provides suburbanites with their physical living
requirements, but simultaneously serves their civic, cultural and social
community needs, [and as such] it will make a most significant contribution to
the enrichment of our lives.11

Two decisive criterion therefore separated this typological advance from its
historical antecedents – its increased scale and suburban situation.
Gruen’s intention was to create a focused and coherent ‘urban’ centre within
the sprawling anonymity of America’s suburban landscape. Founded on the most
noble of motives, the question must then be asked of the shopping mall: where
did it all go wrong?
Riding on the success of the Northland Centre and the design of further
enclosed malls – such as the Southdale Centre, Minnesota – Victor Gruen’s major
book and manifesto, Shopping Towns USA, was first published in 1960. It served as
the benchmark for the evolution of shopping malls, assuming an almost biblical
significance for architects, planners, developers, engineers and others involved in
their design and construction. Many of the planning innovations displayed in the
book remain prevalent today. What Gruen proposed was an improvement to the
typical strip developments that existed on the outskirts of American towns and
cities. Typically these fell into two categories. Either a series of stores located along a
major highway – whose viability depended on car access and the volume of parking
spaces they could offer – or a stand-alone ‘big-box’ warehouse which offered a
wide range of competitively priced goods under one roof. Gruen’s solution was
to unite the positive qualities of the two in a format that seemingly transcended
their limitations. As Longstreth notes, the result was ‘a total environment made
feasible only by widespread automobile use while excluding the negative effects
of traffic’.12 By assimilating the variety of stores offered in strip developments and
the convenience of the ‘big-box’ warehouses, Gruen conceived the shopping mall
as a safe, sheltered, climatically constant, traffic-free, pedestrian environment.
Gruen’s most significant innovation, however, was the balance that he struck
between the desires of the consumer and the demands of the retailer. As a result,
the physical materialization of the mall was governed by a devastatingly simple
and effective plan form that was christened the ‘dumb-bell’. It consisted of a single
internal shopping street with two large ‘anchor stores’ acting as ‘magnets’ at either
end of the route. Instantly beloved by developers everywhere, the giddy, weightless
effect of this layout on the American consumer was named after its creator.
Dubbed ‘the Gruen Transfer or Gruen Effect, the theory holds that shoppers will
be so bedazzled by a store’s surroundings that they will be drawn – unconsciously,
continuously – to shop’.13 And herein lies the problem. The clarity of thought and
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
of Insects get their living off this industrious creature. Another bee,
Stelis nasuta, breaks open the cells after they have been completely
closed and places its own eggs in them, and then again closes the
cells with mortar. The larvae of this Stelis develop more rapidly than
do those of the Chalicodoma, so that the result of this shameless
proceeding is that the young one of the legitimate proprietor—as we
human beings think it—is starved to death, or is possibly eaten up as
a dessert by the Stelis larvae, after they have appropriated all the
pudding.

Another bee, Dioxys cincta, is even more audacious; it flies about in

a careless manner among the Chalicodoma at their work, and they
do not seem to object to its presence unless it interferes with them in
too unmannerly a fashion, when they brush it aside. The Dioxys,
when the proprietor leaves the cell, will enter it and taste the
contents; after having taken a few mouthfuls the impudent creature
then deposits an egg in the cell, and, it is pretty certain, places it at
or near the bottom of the mass of pollen, so that it is not
conspicuously evident to the Chalicodoma when the bee again
returns to add to or complete the stock of provisions. Afterwards the
constructor deposits its own egg in the cell and closes it. The final
result is much the same as in the case of the Stelis, that is to say,
the Chalicodoma has provided food for an usurper; but it appears
probable that the consummation is reached in a somewhat different
manner, namely, by the Dioxys larva eating the egg of the
Chalicodoma, instead of slaughtering the larva. Two of the
Hymenoptera Parasitica are very destructive to the Chalicodoma,
viz. Leucospis gigas and Monodontomerus nitidus; the habits of
which we have already discussed (vol. v. p. 543) under Chalcididae.
Lampert has given a list of the Insects attacking the mason-bee or
found in its nests; altogether it would appear that about sixteen
species have been recognised, most of which destroy the bee larva,
though some possibly destroy the bee's destroyers, and two or three
perhaps merely devour dead examples of the bee, or take the food
from cells, the inhabitants of which have been destroyed by some
untoward event. This author thinks that one half of the bees' progeny
are made away with by these destroyers, while Fabre places the
destruction in the South of France at a still higher ratio, telling us that
in one nest of nine cells, the inhabitants of three were destroyed by
the Dipterous Insect, Anthrax trifasciata, of two by Leucospis, of two
by Stelis, and of one by the smaller Chalcid; there being thus only a
single example of the bee that had not succumbed to one or other of
the enemies. He has sometimes examined a large number of nests
without finding a single one that had not been attacked by one or
other of the parasites, and more often than not several of the
marauders had attacked the nest.

It is said by Lampert and others that there is a passage in Pliny

relating to one of the mason-bees, that the Roman author had
noticed in the act of carrying off stones to build into its nest; being
unacquainted with the special habits of the bee, he seems to have
supposed that the insect was carrying the stone as ballast to keep
itself from being blown away.

Fig. 20—Anthidium manicatum, Carder-bee. A, Male; B, female.

The bees of the genus Anthidium are known to possess the habit of
making nests of wool or cotton, that they obtain from plants growing
at hand. We have one species of this genus of bees in Britain; it
sometimes may be seen at work in the grounds of our Museum at
Cambridge: it is referred to by Gilbert White, who says of it, in his
History of Selborne: "There is a sort of wild bee frequenting the
garden-campion for the sake of its tomentum, which probably it turns
to some purpose in the business of nidification. It is very pleasant to
see with what address it strips off the pubes, running from the top to
the bottom of a branch, and shaving it bare with the dexterity of a
hoop-shaver. When it has got a bundle, almost as large as itself, it
flies away, holding it secure between its chin and its fore legs." The
species of this genus are remarkable as forming a conspicuous
exception to the rule that in bees the female is larger than the male.
The species of Anthidium do not form burrows for themselves, but
either take advantage of suitable cavities formed by other Insects in
wood, or take possession of deserted nests of other bees or even
empty snail-shells. The workers in cotton, of which our British
species A. manicatum is one, line the selected receptacle with a
beautiful network of cotton or wool, and inside this place a finer layer
of the material, to which is added some sort of cement that prevents
the honied mass stored by the bees in this receptacle from passing
out of it. A. diadema, one of the species that form nests in hollow
stems, has been specially observed by Fabre; it will take the cotton
for its work from any suitable plant growing near its nest, and does
not confine itself to any particular natural order of plants, or even to
those that are indigenous to the South of France. When it has
brought a ball of cotton to the nest, the bee spreads out and
arranges the material with its front legs and mandibles, and presses
it down with its forehead on to the cotton previously deposited; in this
way a tube of cotton is constructed inside the reed; when withdrawn,
the tube proved to be composed of about ten distinct cells arranged
in linear fashion, and connected firmly together by means of the
outer layer of cotton; the transverse divisions between the chambers
are also formed of cotton, and each chamber is stored with a mixture
of honey and pollen. The series of chambers does not extend quite
to the end of the reed, and in the unoccupied space the Insect
accumulates small stones, little pieces of earth, fragments of wood
or other similar small objects, so as to form a sort of barricade in the
vestibule, and then closes the tube by a barrier of coarser cotton
taken frequently from some other plant, the mullein by preference.
This barricade would appear to be an ingenious attempt to keep out
parasites, but if so, it is a failure, at any rate as against Leucospis,
which insinuates its eggs through the sides, and frequently destroys
to the last one the inhabitants of the fortress. Fabre states that these
Anthidium, as well as Megachile, will continue to construct cells
when they have no eggs to place in them; in such a case it would
appear from his remarks that the cells are made in due form and the
extremity of the reed closed, but no provisions are stored in the
chambers.

The larva of the Anthidium forms a most singular cocoon. We have

already noticed the difficulty that arises, in the case of these
Hymenopterous larvae shut up in small chambers, as to the disposal
of the matters resulting from the incomplete assimilation of the
aliment ingested. To allow the once-used food to mingle with that still
remaining unconsumed would be not only disagreeable but possibly
fatal to the life of the larva. Hence some species retain the whole of
the excrement until the food is entirely consumed, it being, according
to Adlerz, stored in a special pouch at the end of the stomach; other
Hymenoptera, amongst which we may mention the species of
Osmia, place the excreta in a vacant space. The Anthidium adopts,
however, a most remarkable system: about the middle of its larval
life it commences the expulsion of "frass" in the shape of small
pellets, which it fastens together with silk, as they are voided, and
suspends round the walls of the chamber. This curious arrangement
not only results in keeping the embarrassing material from contact
with the food and with the larva itself, but serves, when the growth of
the latter is accomplished, as the outline or foundations of the
cocoon in which the metamorphosis is completed. This cocoon is of
a very elaborate character; it has, so says Fabre, a beautiful
appearance, and is provided with a very peculiar structure in the
form of a small conical protuberance at one extremity pierced by a
canal. This canal is formed with great care by the larva, which from
time to time places its head in the orifice in process of construction,
and stretches the calibre by opening the mandibles. The object of
this peculiarity in the fabrication of the elaborate cocoon is not clear,
but Fabre inclines to the opinion that it is for respiratory purposes.

Other species of this genus use resin in place of cotton as their

working material. Among these are Anthidium septemdentatum and
A. bellicosum. The former species chooses an old snail-shell as its
nidus, and constructs in it near the top a barrier of resin, so as to
shut off the part where the whorl is too small; then beneath the
shelter of this barrier it accumulates a store of honey-pollen, deposits
an egg, and completes the cell by another transverse barrier of resin;
two such cells are usually constructed in one snail-shell, and below
them is placed a barricade of small miscellaneous articles, similar to
what we have described in speaking of the cotton-working species of
the genus. This bee completes its metamorphosis, and is ready to
leave the cell in early spring. Its congener, A. bellicosum, has the
same habits, with the exception that it works later in the year, and is
thus exposed to a great danger, that very frequently proves fatal to it.
This bee does not completely occupy the snail-shell with its cells, but
leaves the lower and larger portion of the shell vacant. Now, there is
another bee, a species of Osmia, that is also fond of snail-shells as a
nesting-place, and that affects the same localities as the A.
septemdentatum; very often the Osmia selects for its nest the vacant
part of a shell, the other part of which is occupied by the Anthidium;
the result of this is that when the metamorphoses are completed, the
latter bee is unable to effect its escape, and thus perishes in the cell.
Fabre further states with regard to these interesting bees, that no
structural differences of the feet or mandibles can be detected
between the workers in cotton and the workers in resin; and he also
says that in the case where two cells are constructed in one snail-
shell, a male individual is produced from the cell of the greater
capacity, and a female from the other.

Osmia is one of the most important of the genera of bees found in

Europe, and is remarkable for the diversity of instinct displayed in the
formation of the nests of the various species. As a rule they avail
themselves for nidification of hollow places already existing;
choosing excavations in wood, in the mortar of walls, and even in
sandbanks; in several cases the same species is found to be able to
adapt itself to more than one kind of these very different substances.
This variety of habit will render it impossible for us to do justice to
this interesting genus within the space at our disposal, and we must
content ourselves with a consideration of one or two of the more
instructive of the traits of Osmia life. O. tridentata forms its nest in
the stems of brambles, of which it excavates the pith; its mode of
working and some other details of its life have been well depicted by
Fabre. The Insect having selected a suitable bramble-stalk with a cut
extremity, forms a cylindrical burrow in the pith thereof, extending the
tunnel as far as will be required to allow the construction of ten or
more cells placed one after the other in the axis of the cylinder; the
bee does not at first clear out quite all the pith, but merely forms a
tunnel through it, and then commences the construction of the first
cell, which is placed at the end of the tunnel that is most remote from
the entrance. This cavity is to be of oval form, and the Insect
therefore cuts away more of the pith so as to make an oval space,
but somewhat truncate, as it were, at each end, the plane of
truncation at the proximal extremity being of course an orifice.

Fig. 21.—Osmia tricornis, ♀. Algeria.

The first cell thus made is stored with pollen and honey, and an egg
is deposited. Then a barrier has to be constructed to close this
chamber; the material used for the barrier is the pith of the stem, and
the Insect cuts the material required for the purpose from the walls of
the second chamber; the excavation of the second chamber is, in
fact, made to furnish the material for closing up the first cell. In this
way a chain of cells is constructed, their number being sometimes as
many as fifteen. The mode in which the bees, when the
transformations of the larvae and pupae have been completed,
escape from the chain of cells, has been the subject of much
discussion, and errors have arisen from inference being allowed to
take the place of observation. Thus Dufour, who noted this same
mode of construction and arrangement in another Hymenopteron
(Odynerus nidulator), perceived that there was only one orifice of
exit, and also that the Insect that was placed at the greatest distance
from this was the one that, being the oldest of the series, might be
expected to be the first ready to emerge; and as the other cocoons
would necessarily be in the way of its getting out, he concluded that
the egg that was last laid produced the first Insect ready for
emergence. Fabre tested this by some ingenious experiments, and
found that this was not the case, but that the Insects became ready
to leave their place of imprisonment without any reference to the
order in which the eggs were laid, and he further noticed some very
curious facts with reference to the mode of emergence of Osmia
tridentata. Each Insect, when it desires to leave the bramble stem,
tears open the cocoon in which it is enclosed, and also bites through
the barrier placed by the mother between it and the Insect that is
next it, and that separates it from the orifice of exit. Of course, if it
happen to be the outside one of the series it can then escape at
once; but if it should be one farther down in the Indian file it will not
touch the cocoon beyond, but waits patiently, possibly for days; if it
then still find itself confined it endeavours to escape by squeezing
past the cocoon that intervenes between it and liberty, and by biting
away the material at the sides so as to enlarge the passage; it may
succeed in doing this, and so get out, but if it fail to make a side
passage it will not touch the cocoons that are in its way. In the
ordinary course of events, supposing all to go well with the family, all
the cocoons produce their inmates in a state for emergence within a
week or two, and so all get out. Frequently, however, the emergence
is prevented by something having gone wrong with one of the outer
Insects, in which case all beyond it perish unless they are strong
enough to bite a hole through the sides of the bramble-stem. Thus it
appears that whether a particular Osmia shall be able to emerge or
not depends on two things—(1) whether all goes well with all the
other Insects between it and the orifice, and (2) whether the Insect
can bite a lateral hole or not; this latter point also largely depends on
the thickness of the outer part of the stem of the bramble. Fabre's
experiments on these points have been repeated, and his results
confirmed by Nicolas.

The fact that an Osmia would itself perish rather than attack the
cocoon of its brother or sister is certainly very remarkable, and it
induced Fabre to make some further experiments. He took some
cocoons containing dead specimens of Osmia, and placed them in
the road of an Osmia ready for exit, and found that in such case the
bee made its way out by demolishing without any scruple the
cocoons and dead larvae that intervened between it and liberty. He
then took some other reeds, and blocked the way of exit with
cocoons containing living larvae, but of another species of
Hymenoptera. Solenius vagus and Osmia detrita were the species
experimented on in this case, and he found that the Osmia
destroyed the cocoon and living larvae of the Solenius, and so made
its way out. Thus it appears that Osmia will respect the life of its own
species, and die rather than destroy it, but has no similar respect for
the life of another species.

Some of Fabre's most instructive chapters are devoted to the habits

and instincts of various species of the genus Osmia. It is impossible
here to find space even to summarise them, still more impossible to
do them justice; but we have selected the history just recounted,
because it is rare to find in the insect world instances of such self-
sacrifice by an individual for one of the same generation. It would be
quite improper to generalise from this case, however, and conclude
that such respect for its own species is common even amongst the
Osmia. Fabre, indeed, relates a case that offers a sad contrast to the
scene of self-sacrifice and respect for the rights of others that we
have roughly portrayed. He was able to induce a colony of Osmia
tricornis (another species of the genus, be it noted) to establish itself
and work in a series of glass tubes that he placed on a table in his
laboratory. He marked various individuals, so that he was able to
recognise them and note the progress of their industrial works. Quite
a large number of specimens thus established themselves and
concluded their work before his very eyes. Some individuals,
however, when they had completed the formation of a series of cells
in a glass tube or in a reed, had still not entirely completed their tale
of work. It would be supposed that in such a case the individual
would commence the formation of another series of cells in an
unoccupied tube. This was not, however, the case. The bee
preferred tearing open one or more cells already completed—in
some cases, even by itself—scattering the contents, and devouring
the egg; then again provisioning the cell, it would deposit a fresh
egg, and close the chamber. These brief remarks will perhaps suffice
to give some idea of the variety of instinct and habit that prevails in
this very interesting genus. Friese observes that the variety of habits
in this genus is accompanied as a rule by paucity of individuals of a
species, so that in central Europe a collector must be prepared to
give some twenty years or so of attention to the genus before he can
consider he has obtained all the species of Osmia that inhabit his
district.

As a prelude to the remarks we are about to make on the leaf-cutting

bees of the genus Megachile it is well to state that the bee, the
habits of which were described by Réaumur under the name of
"l'abeille tapissière," and that uses portions of the leaves of the
scarlet poppy to line its nest, is now assigned to the genus Osmia,
although Latreille, in the interval that has elapsed since the
publication of Réaumur's work, founded the genus Anthocopa for the
bee in question. Megachile is one of the most important of the
genera of the Dasygastres, being found in most parts of the world,
even in the Sandwich Islands; it consists of bees averaging about
the size of the honey-bee (though some are considerably larger,
others smaller), and having the labrum largely developed; this organ
is capable of complete inflection to the under side of the head, and
when in the condition of repose it is thus infolded, it underlaps and
protects the larger part of the lower lip; the mandibles close over the
infolded labrum, so that, when the Insect is at rest, this appears to be
altogether absent. These bees are called leaf-cutters, from their
habit of forming the cells for their nest out of pieces of the leaves of
plants. We have several species in Britain; they are very like the
common honey-bee in general appearance, though rather more
robustly formed. These Insects, like the Osmiae, avail themselves of
existing hollow places as receptacles in which to place their nests.
M. albocincta frequently takes possession of a deserted worm-
burrow in the ground. The burrow being longer than necessary the
bee commences by cutting off the more distant part by means of a
barricade of foliage; this being done, it proceeds to form a series of
cells, each shaped like a thimble with a lid at the open end (Fig. 22,
A). The body of the thimble is formed of large oval pieces of leaf, the
lid of smaller round pieces; the fragments are cut with great skill from
the leaves of growing plants by the Insect, which seems to have an
idea of the form and size of the piece of foliage necessary for each
particular stage of its work.

Fig. 22—Nidification of leaf-cutting bee, Megachile anthracina. A, one

cell separated, with lid open; the larva (a) reposing on the food; B,
part of a string of the cells. (After Horne.)

Horne has given particulars as to the nest of Megachile anthracina

(fasciculata), an East Indian species.[30] The material employed was
either the leaves of the Indian pulse or of the rose. Long pieces are
cut by the Insect from the leaf, and with these a cell is formed; a
circular piece is next cut, and with this a lid is made for the
receptacle. The cells are about the size and shape of a common
thimble; in one specimen that Horne examined no less than thirty-
two pieces of leaf disposed in seven layers were used for one cell, in
addition to three pieces for the round top. The cells are carefully
prepared, and some kind of matter of a gummy nature is believed to
be used to keep in place the pieces forming the interior layers. The
cells are placed end to end, as shown in Fig. 22, B; five to seven
cells form a series, and four or six series are believed to be
constructed by one pair of this bee, the mass being located in a
hollow in masonry or some similar position. Each cell when
completed is half filled with pollen in the usual manner, and an egg is
then laid in it. This bee is much infested by parasites, and is eaten by
the Grey Hornbill (Meniceros bicornis).
Megachile lanata is one of the Hymenoptera that in East India enter
houses to build their own habitations. According to Horne both sexes
take part in the work of construction, and the spots chosen are
frequently of a very odd nature. The material used is some kind of
clay, and the natural situation may be considered to be the interior of
a hollow tube, such as the stem of a bamboo; but the barrel of a gun,
and the hollow in the back of a book that has been left lying open,
have been occasionally selected by the Insect as suitable. Smith
states that the individuals developed in the lower part of a tubular
series of this species were females, "which sex takes longer to
develop, and thus an exit is not required for them so soon as for the
occupants of the upper cells which are males." M. proxima, a
species almost exactly similar in appearance to M. lanata, makes its
cells of leaf-cuttings, however, and places them in soft soil.

Fabre states that M. albocincta, which commences the formation of

its nest in a worm-burrow by means of a barricade, frequently makes
the barricade, but no nest; sometimes it will indeed make the
barricade more than twice the proper size, and thus completely fill up
the worm burrow. Fabre considers that these eccentric proceedings
are due to individuals that have already formed proper nests
elsewhere, and that after completing these have still some strength
remaining, which they use up in this fruitless manner.

The Social bees (Sociales) include, so far as is yet known, only a

very small number of genera, and are so diverse, both in habits and
structure, that the propriety of associating them in one group is more
than doubtful; the genera are Bombus (Fig. 331, vol. v.), with its
commensal genus or section, Psithyrus (Fig. 23); Melipona (Fig. 24),
in which Trigona and Tetragona may at present be included, and
Apis (Fig. 6); this latter genus comprising the various honey-bees
that are more or less completely domesticated in different parts of
the world.

In the genus Bombus the phenomena connected with the social life
are more similar to what we find among wasps than to what they are
in the genus Apis. The societies come to an end at the close of the
season, a few females live through the winter, and each of these
starts a new colony in the following spring. Males, females and
workers exist, but the latter are not distinguished by any good
characters from the females, and are, in fact, nothing but more or
less imperfect forms thereof; whereas in Apis the workers are
distinguished by structural characters not found in either of the true
sexes.

Hoffer has given a description of the commencement of a society of

Bombus lapidarius.[31] A large female, at the end of May, collected
together a small mass of moss, then made an expedition and
returned laden with pollen; under cover of the moss a cell was
formed of wax taken from the hind-body and mixed with the pollen
the bee had brought in; this cell was fastened to a piece of wood;
when completed it formed a subspherical receptacle, the outer wall
of which consisted of wax, and whose interior was lined with honey-
saturated pollen; then several eggs were laid in this receptacle, and
it was entirely closed. Hoffer took the completed cell away to use it
for museum purposes, and the following day the poor bee that had
formed it died. From observations made on Bombus agrorum he was
able to describe the subsequent operations; these are somewhat as
follows:—The first cell being constructed, stored, and closed, the
industrious architect, clinging to the cell, takes a few days' rest, and
after this interval commences the formation of a second cell; this is
placed by the side of the first, to which it is connected by a mixture of
wax and pollen; the second cell being completed a third may be
formed; but the labours of the constructor about this time are
augmented by the hatching of the eggs deposited a few days
previously; for the young larvae, having soon disposed of the small
quantity of food in the interior of the waxen cell, require feeding. This
operation is carried on by forming a small opening in the upper part
of the cell, through which the bee conveys food to the interior by
ejecting it from her mouth through the hole; whether the food is
conveyed directly to the mouths of the larvae or not, Hoffer was
unable to observe; it being much more difficult to approach this royal
founder without disturbing her than it is the worker-bees that carry on
similar occupations at a subsequent period in the history of the
society. The larvae in the first cell, as they increase in size,
apparently distend the cell in an irregular manner, so that it becomes
a knobbed and rugged, truffle-like mass. The same thing happens
with the other cells formed by the queen. Each of these larval
masses contains, it should be noticed, sister-larvae all of one age;
when full grown they pupate in the mass, and it is worthy of remark
that although all the eggs in one larval mass were laid at the same
time, yet the larvae do not all pupate simultaneously, neither do all
the perfect Insects appear at once, even if all are of one sex. The
pupation takes place in a cocoon that each larva forms for itself of
excessively fine silk. The first broods hatched are formed chiefly, if
not entirely, of workers, but small females may be produced before
the end of the season. Huber and Schmiedeknecht state that though
the queen provides the worker-cells with food before the eggs are
placed therein, yet no food is put in the cells in which males and
females are produced. The queen, at the time of pupation of the
larvae, scrapes away the wax by which the cocoons are covered,
thus facilitating the escape of the perfect Insect, and, it may also be,
aiding the access of air to the pupa. The colony at first grows very
slowly, as the queen can, unaided, feed only a small number of
larvae. But after she receives the assistance of the first batch of
workers much more rapid progress is made, the queen greatly
restricting her labours, and occupying herself with the laying of eggs;
a process that now proceeds more and more rapidly, the queen in
some cases scarcely ever leaving the nest, and in others even
becoming incapable of flight. The females produced during the
intermediate period of the colony are smaller than the mother, but
supplement her in the process of egg-laying, as also do the workers
to a greater or less extent. The conditions that determine the egg-
laying powers of these small females and workers are apparently
unknown, but it is ascertained that these powers vary greatly in
different cases, so that if the true queen die the continuation of the
colony is sometimes effectively carried on by these her former
subordinates. In other cases, however, the reverse happens, and
none of the inhabitants may be capable of producing eggs: in this
event two conditions may be present; either larvae may exist in the
nest, or they may be absent. In the former case the workers provide
them with food, and the colony may thus still be continued; but in the
latter case, there being no profitable occupation for the bees to
follow, they spend the greater part of the time sitting at home in the
nest.

Supposing all to go well with the colony it increases very greatly, but
its prosperity is checked in the autumn; at this period large numbers
of males are produced as well as new queens, and thereafter the
colony comes to an end, only a few fertilised females surviving the
winter, each one to commence for herself a new colony in the
ensuing spring.

The interior of the nest of a bumble-bee (Bombus) frequently

presents a very irregular appearance; this is largely owing to the fact
that these bees do not use the cells as cradles twice, but form others
as they may be required, on the old remains. The cells, moreover,
are of different sizes, those that produce workers being the smallest,
those that cradle females being the largest, while those in which
males are reared are intermediate in size. Although the old cells are
not used a second time for rearing brood they are nevertheless
frequently adapted to the purposes of receptacles for pollen and for
honey, and for these objects they may be increased in size and
altered in form.

It may be gathered from various records that the period required to

complete the development of the individual Bombus about
midsummer is four weeks from the deposition of the egg to the
emergence of the perfect Insect, but exact details and information as
to whether this period varies with the sex of the Insect developed are
not to be found. The records do not afford any reason for supposing
that such distinction will be found to exist: the size of the cells
appears the only correlation, suggested by the facts yet known,
between the sex of the individual and the circumstances of
development.
The colonies of Bombus vary greatly in prosperity, if we take as the
test of this the number of individuals produced in a colony. They
never, however, attain anything at all approaching to the vast number
of individuals that compose a large colony of wasps, or that exist in
the crowded societies of the more perfectly social bees. A populous
colony of a subterranean Bombus may attain the number of 300 or
400 individuals. Those that dwell on the surface are as a rule much
less populous, as they are less protected, so that changes of
weather are more prejudicial to them. According to Smith, the
average number of a colony of B. muscorum in the autumn in this
country is about 120—viz. 25 females, 36 males, 59 workers. No
mode of increasing the nests in a systematic manner exists in this
genus; they do not place the cells in stories as the wasps do; and
this is the case notwithstanding the fact that a cell is not twice used
for the rearing of young. When the ground-space available for cell-
building is filled the Bombus begins another series of cells on the
ruins of the first one. From this reason old nests have a very irregular
appearance, and this condition of seeming disorder is greatly
increased by the very different sizes of the cells themselves. We
have already alluded to some of these cells, more particularly to
those of different capacities to suit the sexes of the individuals to be
reared in them. In addition to these there are honey-tubs, pollen-
tubs, and the cells of the Psithyrus (Fig. 23), the parasitic but friendly
inmates of the Bombus-nests. A nest of Bombus, exhibiting the
various pots projecting from the remains of empty and partially
destroyed cells, presents, as may well be imagined, a very curious
appearance. Some of the old cells apparently are partly destroyed
for the sake of the material they are composed of. Others are formed
into honey-tubs, of a make-shift nature. It must be recollected that,
as a colony increases, stores of provisions become absolutely
necessary, otherwise in bad weather the larvae could not be fed. In
good weather, and when flowers abound, these bees collect and
store honey in abundance; in addition to placing it in the empty pupa-
cells, they also form for it special receptacles; these are delicate
cells made entirely of wax filled with honey, and are always left open
for the benefit of the community. The existence of these honey-tubs
in bumble-bees' nests has become known to our country urchins,
whose love for honey and for the sport of bee-baiting leads to
wholesale destruction of the nests. According to Hoffer, special tubs
for the storing of pollen are sometimes formed; these are much taller
than the other cells. The Psithyrus that live in the nests with the
Bombus are generally somewhat larger than the latter, and
consequently their cells may be distinguished in the nests by their
larger size. A bumble-bees' nest, composed of all these
heterogenous chambers rising out of the ruins of former layers of
cells, presents a scene of such apparent disorder that many have
declared that the bumble-bees do not know how to build.

Although the species of Bombus are not comparable with the hive-
bee in respect of the perfection and intelligent nature of their work,
yet they are very industrious Insects, and the construction of the
dwelling-places of the subterranean species is said to be carried out
in some cases with considerable skill, a dome of wax being formed
as a sort of roof over the brood cells. Some work even at night. Fea
has recorded the capture of a species in Upper Burmah working by
moonlight, and the same industry may be observed in this country if
there be sufficient heat as well as light. Godart, about 200 years ago,
stated that a trumpeter-bee is kept in some nests to rouse the
denizens to work in the morning: this has been treated as a fable by
subsequent writers, but is confirmed in a circumstantial manner by
Hoffer, who observed the performance in a nest of B. ruderatus in his
laboratory. On the trumpeter being taken away its office was the
following morning filled by another individual The trumpeting was
done as early as three or four o'clock in the morning, and it is by no
means impossible that the earliness of the hour may have had
something to do with the fact that for 200 years no one confirmed the
old naturalist's observation.

One of the most curious facts in connection with Bombus is the

excessive variation that many of the species display in the colour of
the beautiful hair with which they are so abundantly provided. There
is not only usually a difference between the sexes in this respect, but
also extreme variation within the limits of the same sex, more
especially in the case of the males and workers; there is also an
astonishing difference in the size of individuals. These variations are
carried to such an extent that it is almost impossible to discriminate
all the varieties of a species by inspection of the superficial
characters. The structures peculiar to the male, as well as the sting
of the female, enable the species to be determined with tolerable
certainty. Cholodkovsky,[32] on whose authority this statement as to
the sting is made, has not examined it in the workers, so that we do
not know whether it is as invariable in them as he states it to be in
queens of the same species. According to Handlirsch,[33] each
species of Bombus has the capacity of variation, and many of the
varieties are found in one nest, that is, among the offspring of a
single pair of the species, but many of the variations are restricted to
certain localities. Some of the forms can be considered as actual
("fertige") species, intermediate forms not being found, and even the
characters by which species are recognised being somewhat
modified. As examples of this he mentions Bombus silvarum and B.
arenicola, B. pratorum and B. scrimshiranus. In other cases,
however, the varieties are not so discontinuous, intermediate forms
being numerous; this condition is more common than the one we
have previously described; B. terrestris, B. hortorum, B. lapidarius
and B. pomorum are examples of these variable species. The
variation runs to a considerable extent in parallel lines in the different
species, there being a dark and a light form of each; also each
species that has a white termination to the body appears in a form
with a red termination, and vice versa. In the Caucasus many
species that have everywhere else yellow bands possess them
white; and in Corsica there are species that are entirely black, with a
red termination to the body, though in continental Europe the same
species exhibit yellow bands and a white termination to the body.
With so much variation it will be readily believed that much remains
to be done in the study of this fascinating genus. It is rich in species
in the Northern hemisphere, but poor in the Southern one, and in
both the Ethiopian and Australian regions it is thought to be entirely
wanting.
The species of the genus Psithyrus (Apathus of many authors)
inhabit the nests of Bombus; although less numerous than the
species of the latter genus, they also are widely distributed. They are
so like Bombus in appearance that they were not distinguished from
them by the earlier entomologists; and what is still more remarkable,
each species of Psithyrus resembles the Bombus with which it
usually lives. There appear, however, to be occasional exceptions to
this rule, Smith having seen one of the yellow-banded Psithyrus in
the nest of a red-tailed Bombus. Psithyrus is chiefly distinguished
from Bombus by the absence of certain characters that fit the latter
Insects for their industrial life; the hind tibiae have no smooth space
for the conveyance of pollen, and, so far as is known, there are only
two sexes, males and perfect females.
 Fig. 23—Psithyrus vestalis, Britain. A, Female, x 3⁄2; B, outer side of
hind leg.

The Bombus and Psithyrus live together on the best terms, and it
appears probable that the latter do the former no harm beyond
appropriating a portion of their food supplies. Schmiedeknecht says
they are commensals, not parasites; but it must be admitted that
singularly few descriptions of the habits and life-histories of these
interesting Insects have been recorded. Hoffer has, however, made
a few direct observations which confirm, and at the same time make
more definite, the vague ideas that have been generally prevalent
among entomologists. He found and took home a nest of Bombus
variabilis, which contained also a female of Psithyrus campestris, so
that he was able to make observations on the two. The Psithyrus
was much less industrious than the Bombus, and only left the nest
somewhat before noon, returning home again towards evening; after
about a month this specimen became still more inactive, and passed
entire days in the nest, occupying itself in consuming the stores of
honey of its hosts, of which very large quantities were absorbed, the
Psithyrus being much larger than the host-bee. The cells in which
the young of the Psithyrus are hatched are very much larger than
those of the Bombus, and, it may therefore be presumed, are formed
by the Psithyrus itself, for it can scarcely be supposed that the
Bombus carries its complaisance so far as to construct a cell
specially adapted to the superior stature of its uninvited boarder.
When a Psithyrus has been for some time a regular inhabitant of a
nest, the Bombus take its return home from time to time as a matter
of course, displaying no emotion whatever at its entry. Occasionally
Hoffer tried the introduction of a Psithyrus to a nest that had not
previously had one as an inmate. The new arrival caused a great
hubbub among the Bombus, which rushed to it as if to attack it, but
did not do so, and the alarm soon subsided, the Psithyrus taking up
the position in the nest usually affected by the individuals of the
species. On introducing a female Psithyrus to a nest of Bombus in
which a Psithyrus was already present as an established guest, the
latter asserted its rights and drove away the new comer. Hoffer also
tried the experiment of placing a Psithyrus campestris in the nest of
Bombus lapidarius—a species to which it was a stranger;
notwithstanding its haste to fly away, it was at once attacked by the
Bombus, who pulled it about but did not attempt to sting it.

When Psithyrus is present in a nest of Bombus it apparently affects

the inhabitants only by diminishing their stores of food to so great an
extent that the colony remains small instead of largely increasing in
numbers. Although Bombus variabilis, when left to itself, increases
the number of individuals in a colony to 200 or more, Hoffer found in
a nest in which Psithyrus was present, that on the 1st of September
the assemblage consisted only of a queen Bombus and fifteen
workers, together with eighteen specimens of the Psithyrus, eight of
these being females.

The nests of Bombus are destroyed by several animals, probably for

the sake of the honey contained in the pots; various kinds of small
mammals, such as mice, the weasel, and even the fox, are known to
destroy them; and quite a fauna of Insects may be found in them; the
relations of these to their hosts are very little known, but some
undoubtedly destroy the bees' larvae, as in the case of Meloe,
Mutilla and Conops. Birds do not as a rule attack these bees, though
the bee-eater, Merops apiaster, has been known to feed on them
very heavily.

The genera of social bees known as Melipona, Trigona or Tetragona,

may, according to recent authorities, be all included in one genus,
Melipona. Some of these Insects are amongst the smallest of bees,
so that one, or more, species go by the name of "Mosquito-bees."
The species appear to be numerous, and occur in most of the
tropical parts of the continents of the world, but unfortunately very
little is known as to their life-histories or economics; they are said to