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Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 475 Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Dwelling Form (IDWELL 2020) Reappropriation of Centrality and the Reproduction of Relationality in Emerging Core Urban Spaces An Analysis of the Resilience and Territorialisation of Place-Based Social Networks in the Pseudo-Public Space of the Malled Metropolitan Centres of Auckland, New Zealand, During COVID-19 Lockdown Manfredo Manfredini 1, 2,* Jennifer Jie Rong1, Franco Manai1, Luciana Rech3, Jacky Yongjie Ye4 1School of Architecture and Planning, The University of Auckland, New Zealand 2 School of Architecture and Urbanism, Hunan University, China 3 Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil 4 School of Computer Sciences, The University of Auckland, New Zealand *Corresponding author. Email: [email protected] ABSTRACT COVID-19 restrictions have exacerbated the effects of an urbanisation mode that, through the combination of rampant neoliberalism, pervasive translocalism and ubiquitous digital transduction, has produced a fragmented and enclavic space with high spatial inequalities. Threatening to enhance these inequalities, centres of public life, as shopping and entertainment malls, are subject to an inexorable process of creative destruction determined by transnational capitalist logics. The system of distributed centrality of the modern shopping centre is further polarised by the ultra-modern mega-enclosures. The ultra-modern mega-enclosures introduce a participatory transductive experientialisation that supplants the scripted eventfulness of the modern shopping centre. This form of experientialisation integrates consumption and production to exploit free labour and further dispossess the public and private local entities of their asset ownership and control. However, this new form of consumerism, here defined as post-consumerism, also seems to support a countering agency of the individual prosumer by providing infrastructure and materials for autonomous reproduction of socio-spatial relationality. Yet, if the resilience of the networks of these countering processes is uncertain, their vulnerability and readiness to cope with sudden disruptive changes are unknown. An observational study on the effects of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown shed light on the hybrid actual– virtual realities that are strongly anchored in places with a high degree of participatory transductive experientialisation. Crowdsourced Instagram data from two case studies, a modern and an ultra-modern centre in Auckland, New Zealand, were comparatively analysed. Findings showed that during the period of closure, the networks of the ultra-modern centre maintained the sustained autonomous activity of the previous period, while those of the modern centre saw a sharp activity decline. This indicates a stronger resilience of the relational networks of the ultra-modern centre, here described as a place of superlative abstract civicness, suggesting a higher individual appropriation and association of its meta-stable spatialities, underpinning a critical affirmative interpretation of the post-consumerist urban condition. Keywords: Public Space and COVID-19, Shopping Centres, Spatial Data Analysis, Instagram, Auckland, New Zealand Copyright © 2020 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL. This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license -http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/. 161 Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 475 distributed population density where decades of neoliberal 1. INTRODUCTION regime have weakened the urban commons, increased the geographical polarisation of socio-economic inequalities and created locally disconnected urban centres (Figures 3 1.1 New Zealand's COVID-19 response and the and 4) dominated by large enclosures for shopping and affected groups entertainment of very different quality that concentrate the social infrastructures (Manfredini & Jenner, 2015). The New Zealand response to the pandemic has been internationally recognised as one of the most effective for both its health and wellbeing results. Restrictive measures were based on a four-tier alert system framework whose highest level, Eliminate, introduced a strict lockdown at a very early stage (Figures 1 and 2). The lockdown resulted in a swift regression of the transmission rate, preventing a crisis of the health system, containing the number of fatalities and reducing the health impact of prolonged isolation periods (Ministry of Health Manatū Hauora, 2020b). The strong priority given to supporting people’s welfare, wages, income and health, which involved investments compared to GDP larger than most international economies, guaranteed high wellbeing standards to most New Zealanders (The Treasury Te Tai Ōhanga, 2020). This eventuated in a peculiar distribution of the infection among the population. Substantially inverting the structural socio-economic inequalities in health of both the general health in the country (Wilson et al., 2018) and the specific COVID-19 disease in most countries with widespread diffusion, in New Figure 3. Auckland Plan 2050: Development Strategy— Zealand the most affected was the group of the privileged, Existing Urban. Map showing the City Centre (red circle) according to the data of the Ministry of Health Manatū and the nine Metropolitan Centres (others large black Hauora (2020a). Europeans, the ethnic group with the circles with Sylvia Park highlighted in yellow) and the highest income, outnumbered by far all other ethnic groups town centres (small circles with St Lukes highlighted in combined (Stats NZ Tatauranga Aotearoa, 2020). yellow), (Auckland Council, 2012). Millennials in their 20s had the highest percentage of cases, at 23% (Ministry of Health Manatū Hauora, 2020a). Figures 1 and 2. New Zealand coronavirus epidemic curve (Ministry of Health Manatū Hauora, 2020a). 1.2 Auckland’s public space in ultra-modern enclosures of superlative abstract civicness The geographical incidence of the infection has been uneven with the prevalence of urban areas and with a concentration in Auckland, the largest city in the country, Figure 4. Sidewalk to “Erewhon” (nowhere): one abrupt accounting for 36% of the cases. As with other New interruprion of the pedestrian network on the main street of Zealand cities, Auckland is characterised by a low and Sylvia Park Metropolitn Centre (M. Manfredini, 2020) 162 Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research, volume 475 This urbanisation mode has progressively produced an conviviality and children care (Manfredini, 2019a) (Figure enclavic fragmentation of the city (Shane, 2005) that 7). With the resulting comprehensive financialisation, geographically translates the concentration of power and displacement, abstracted experientialisation and simulation wealth in the hands of few, often private transnational of urban infrastructures, the ultra-modern enclosure has organisations. A prime example of civic commodification exacerbated the effects of the neoliberalist structural is Sylvia Park, one of the top 10 formally designated intersection between capitalist forces and states. This metropolitan centres of Auckland, whose area is entirely amplifies social and civic disconnectedness, strengthens the occupied by a single shopping mall owned and managed by marginalisation and displacement of antagonist and the New Zealand's largest listed property fund (Figures 5 misaligned groups (Hubbard, 2004) and furthers the and 6). In recent years, the malled centres underwent a dispossession of the public and private local entities of their major systemic reset. Their leading retail sector is asset ownership and control (Harvey, 2019). anticipated to face a process of creative destruction (Harvey, 2006; Ritzer, 2003) determined by the unrelenting 3. Post-consumerist hybrid public space in the market erosion by online retail that may lead to the outright digital age disappearance of the shopping centres (Ritzer & Degli Espositi, 2020). This threat comes in the aftermath of the Customers of the ultra-modern enclosure of superlative major reorganisation consequent to the advent of experience abstract civicness experience a new form of consumption. economy that has transformed these centres into eventful What emerges is a post-consumerist behaviour based on the places of creative consumption (Manfredini & Jenner, combination of three digitally pervasive phenomena that 2015). A new ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey, 2012) to address this foster reproduction of socio-spatial relationships: crisis is necessary to lure back and expand consumption prosumption, translocalisation and multiassociative flows into their spaces. The new economic model that transduction. Prosumption expresses a form of participatory requires this transforms the modern mall, focused on consumption that coalesces processes of production and shopping and entertainment, into a different structure: the consumption where prosumers consume what they partially ultra-modern enclosure of comprehensive superlative or entirely produce (Ritzer, 2014; Ritzer & Jurgenson, abstract civicness (Manfredini, 2019b). 2010). Translocalisation is the constant redefinition of territorialisation patterns due to an increasing mobilization of people and things that reconfigures territorial patterns on all spatial scales, from the local to the global, with progressive temporal instability (Kazig et al., 2016). Multiassociative transduction is a transmutative operation that implies

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