URBAN DESIGN International (2000) 5, 141±154 Q 2000 Stockton Press All rights reserved 1357-5317/00 $15.00 www.stockton-press.co.uk/udi

`Hyperreality' in the shire: Bicester Village and the village of Bicester A. Reeve1 and R. Simmonds1 1

Joint Centre for Urban Design, Oxford Brookes University OX3 0BP

Using the concept of hyperreality as articulated by the French theorist Jean Baudrillard, this paper explores the problematic of aesthetic authenticity in urban design practice, particularly as revealed in the form of contemporary and purpose built shopping environments. Beginning with an explanation of this complex term, we go on to illustrate its ramifications for design through a detailed comparison between a traditional high street in an English market town, which has been retro-fitted to compete with a factory retail outlet built on its edge. The paper is the first of a two-part piece, the second of which will revisit the work of Goffman to help explain how the new, themed, leisure environments raise questions about the authenticity of behaviour and engagement in such theatrical settings. Keywords: Hyperreality; retail mall; high street; simulation; Bicester, UK They had taken out such a good insurance policy that when their house in the country burnt down, they were able to build another one, older than the first. (Jean Baudrillard)

Introduction In Oxfordshire, England, stand adjacent two destinations sharing the same name but quite different from the point of view of conventional urbanism: Bicester Village, and the village of Bicester (Figure 1). The first is a retail factory outlet mall (Figure 2). In Mike Davis's (1995) term, this is a `univalent' place, built for a single function ± shopping. It is the first `factory outlet retail park' in the UK and has received much press attention, partly for its commercial interest but also because it represents the latest form of US style neo-traditional design. It draws its customers from a 60-mile radius, including North London and South Birmingham. The second, the village of Bicester, might be described as `multi-valent'. This is a traditional small English market town with a single main shopping area focused on Sheep Street (Figure 3), which has grown over the centuries to meet often quite contradictory intentions. Bicester is now a designated expansion town, providing *Correspondence: A. Reeve, Joint Centre for Urban Design, Oxford Brookes University OX3 0BP e-mail: arreeve@brookes. ac.uk

housing for Oxfordshire's growing population of newcomers, and Sheep Street has been the subject of a thoughtful initiative to retrofit it in light of this increased population and changing consumer demand. Bicester Village and the town of Bicester stand within a few hundred metres of each other, physically; but in most urban design and management terms they are, at least on the surface, world's apart. Comparing and contrasting these two places reveals something of how decisions are made about what places should look like and why in the cultural climate of today. The purpose of this paper, using the Bicester cases, is to discuss urban aesthetics and place making. This exploration is developed out of a cluster of theoretical concepts centred around the notion of the `hyperreal' ± particularly as developed in the work of Jean Baudrillard. The first aim is to set out the main characteristics of this intellectual position as they might relate to urban design before applying them as a means of interpreting the two Bicesters. The aim is not so much to develop a critique about what has been done, but to discover what this reveals about the dilemmas and opportunities which urban designers must confront when

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Figure 1. Local tourist guide of Bicester, highlighting Sheep Street and Bicester Village.

making decisions, or managing the process in which decisions are made about how such places should look in the cultural climate of today.

Aspects of the hyperreal

A second paper will compare the Bicester Village mall with Universal City Walk, a currently high profile recreation mall in Burbank, Los Angeles. The paper describes the two cases, this time using concepts derived from the work of Irving Goffman and Ricard Sennett, relating to idea of `public realm as theatre'.

For Baudrillard the activity which most characterised the practices of modern society was simulation; most obviously in the information sciences in the form of the computer programme, but also in genetic engineering; and in entertainment, through movies, television and theme parks. The products of these practices, which

Figure 2. Bicester Village Mall.

Figure 3. Bicester Village (Sheep Street).

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Simulacra

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Baudrillard (1983) called `simulacra', are at the heart of what contemporary post-industrial and consumer orientated societies are about. Designers of consumer products, including the built environment, have not been slow to respond to the possibilities implicit in the demands of consumer culture and the built environment has been redefined, though not for the first time in history, as yet another medium through which simulations, in this case of already existing images, could be constructed. `Simulation', in its highest form, seems to imply the reproduction of a process, for example attempts to model the decision making process of the sales department of a company, with its embedded rules and sequencing of inputs from the various actors involved, in order to understand the impact of a new decision rule for the actors. But simulation can also refer to a simpler activity, for example, where a group of enthusiasts reconstruct in authentic costume and style the various stages of a famous battle. Another form of simulation involves a greater degree of abstraction, where the intention is to discover the essence of an existing image, distilling it out and reproducing the abstraction in the same or a different medium: for example, the attempt to distill out the essence of a given local or regional `place', as in the work of Aldo Rossi. Finally, the simplest form of simulation is where the whole or part of an object is copied as a reproduction. Baudrillard (1988) made the telling observation that, at least in relation to the built environment, Europeans have tended to prefer abstract simulacra, and Americans simulacra in the form of elaborate reproductions. This point is developed ahead. `Simulation' has, of course, been practiced throughout history. What is different today is its pervasiveness and the fact that many of the great advances in science, and engineering, have incorporated it as a technique of their instrumental method. For example, without computer modelling, bio-chemists would have a much reduced ability to design new drugs. Simulation often involves the translation of a process, event or object from one medium into another. This seems to be one important way, as we will discuss, of beginning to understand the ever growing relationship between the so called `real' and the so called `virtual' in the design of the built environment.

Symbolic value In the world of designed commodities today, it is the `image' on which creative energy in making simulations is focused. Consumer products have always had a `symbolic' (or fetishistic) value along with a `use' and `exchange' value. Indeed, Baudrillard (1981) claimed that it is possible to discover over history a changing political economy of `the sign', running parallel with but quite distinct from the political economies of use and exchange. In the current age, the symbolic value of consumer products, including the built environment, has come to have much greater relative importance than it did in the period of Modernism. This function of the image was also true with respect to some earlier cultural periods and, for some commentators, it is hardly surprising that the present age has allowed the image to dominate in both what is produced and how things are consumed: after Modernism and its reductionist obsession with use or function this is hardly surprising (Jameson, 1984). There are, however, important differences between simulation today and that associated with earlier design traditions. It is a cliche of postmodernism that images can come from almost anywhere, choice contingent only on the need to satisfy a multitude of different consumer or `lifestyle' groups and to create simulations which have meaning for them. In the past, the use of images from previous eras once indicated respect for the authority of the source and in turn imbued the original with a mask of authority or authenticity. This was the case even when these `originals' were themselves copies of `originals' from their own or yet earlier epochs, as, indeed, they usually were. The simulated image today, however, appears to have more cultural power than any original source from which it might have been copied. The simulation is now more `real', more potent, than the authentic original; first perhaps because it is a simulacra in an age fascinated by them; second, perhaps because images, today, are used as instruments in more complex games of signification, not simple acts of reference and/or respect; and third, because images are now `expressed' at specific consumer groups, not indiscriminately at all groups of consumers as a mass. It can be argued that identities are URBAN DESIGN International

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constructed today through consumption and the apparent meanings that they carry. This has given rise to many of the arch games which are associated with certain branches of architectural practice, but which are either ignored or actively condemned by urban design practitioners. Ada Louise Huxtable, writing in the New York Times (1992), expresses how bewildering this can be for the average individual, including the urban designer, who has no expertise in such practices ± `The spectator of city spaces can not make a distinction between the real and the false, nor tell the difference between the real fake and the fake fake. Now we find that the authentically unauthentic has become a new urban design frontier`. These `games' have a more serious intent and more relevance for urban design practice than most not engaged in the practice might care to recognise. That is, they go beyond mere aesthetics, and directly address the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of identifying the `authentic' in the contemporary cultural climate. The `real' and the `virtual' Simulation (given our broad use of the term) of `real' or prior events, people and objects including the built environment has been one of the main devices of literature and the arts through history. In the last two or three decades there has been a massive development of the media through which simulations can be `presented', first film and television, then computer programmes and games and now powerful combinations of the two, which permit a form of direct collaboration between individuals and this new kind of virtuality. Each new medium brings with it aesthetically and even viscerally powerful new ways of simulating the `real' and new distortions of it, which are products of the medium itself and the political and economic circumstances its agents work within ± in terms of the way the medium is exploited by people to make a living. Moreover, there has also been a massive proliferation of the simulating media in the last few decades: virtually everyone has access to at least one television; the ownership of computers and access to the Internet is expanding rapidly; and advertising is becoming ever more sophisticated in finding new outlets. In Post Modernism, the city of bricks and mortar URBAN DESIGN International

itself becomes converted, once again, into a medium through which simulations can be carried out. Assumptions about the nature of this medium, however, have been very different on the two sides of the Atlantic. European designers have tended to make more use of what Robert Venturi et al. (1977) called `physiognomic' messages; those which are carried in the form of buildings and public spaces, with much less developed interest in `heraldic' messages, those which are contained in the decoration of buildings and public places, or applied to them. In the USA designers have tended to be equally interested in both of these possibilities of the medium but also in `informational' messages, such as directional signs, advertising, the name of a store, what kind of goods are available, how much they cost, and so on. Americans have embraced the idea of the city of bricks and mortar as medium more completely than have Europeans. Just as images of the city of bricks and mortar are being simulated in new media, so the medium of bricks and mortar itself has begun to simulate images from this media. It is said that the Disney Corporation drew its image for the American Main Street, in its theme parks, and for the housing areas in the new town of Celebration which is being built in Florida, from the films of Frank Capra in the 1940s, especially It's a Wonderful Life. Of course that was in itself a utopian simulation of a romantic interpretation of America. Universal City Walk, a recreational theme park developed by Universal Studios and the subject of the second paper in the next issue, projects the image of modern Los Angeles, using images which are sometimes drawn from movies. This has direct relevance for understanding how the British public are responding to the Bicester Village mall and its New England imagery, as will be seen. The idea of the `virtual city' is often interpreted in two ways. The first focuses on the `electronic spaces' of the city (Graham and Marvin, 1996) and the way it mediates the social and economic life of people who live within it and beyond. The second is the deliberate design of a digital city, usually paralleling and reflecting aspects of an existing city. Urban design practitioners usually take one of two attitudes to the emergence of `virtual' cities.

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The first is to assume that the distortions and constraints of the electronic media mean that there will be no significant relationship between the growing number of `virtual' cities and the `real' ones with which they are usually associated. The `virtual' city will be just a web page with a picture of the town hall, a summary of the Mayor's inaugural address and details of what is on in the theatre. The second view is to run scared and feel that the virtual city is going to become ever more closely integrated with the city of bricks and mortar. It will transform its image and function in unknown ways and probably for the worse, certainly as far as urban design practice is concerned. Christine Boyer (1996) sums up these anxieties nicely ± `standing on the threshold between fixity and relativity, the natural and the artifice, the real and the imaginary, the liminal space of cybercities still waits to be imagined'. Bill Mitchell (1995) warns designers that if they want to participate in the city of the future, they must play a role in designing or managing the image of the emergent `city of bits'. Already we can see the first signs of how these two worlds are growing together. A number of companies who market goods for other businesses on the Internet have begun to buy up `real' stores, i.e. those with buildings which display and sell goods. They need the `presence' in the form of stores with clearly defined locations, identities, and images, and where customers might, if they wish to, inspect the goods before purchase ± in the old-fashioned way. The web site will project the simulated image of the store, perhaps with its actual floor plan. But, it is not difficult to imagine that the process will soon become reversed as the store design begins to project the marketing structure, functional needs, and a more focused and/or flexible image of the company and the consumers it is trying to reach through the net. The `hyperreal' The term `hyperreal' is used in a casual way by many designers, especially when referring to the sense, as described by Christine Boyer above, that designers are losing control of the physical world. As a term generally attributed to Baudrillard, it has, however, both a general and a more specific meaning which builds on much of what has been said above. The specific definitions begin with the

premise that to be acceptable in today's consumer market a product, including the built environment, must have an image which appears to be a simulation of an existing or pre-existing image. The operative word here, however, is `appears' because, in a world where the copy has more potency than the original, few people are going to worry about what the authentic original actually was ± or even if there was one. It is quite enough that it appears to be a simulation or a copy of something `real'. It yields the strange phenomenon of the copy without an original, a common phenomenon which emerges equally in the most arcane and the most banal levels of design practice today. This is what Ada Louise Huxtable, using the term `fake' in a provocative rather than dismissive way and reflecting Umbert Eco's (1985) earlier use of the word, seems to mean above by a `fake fake'. The copy of an authentic original is the `real fake' and the copy with no original is the `fake fake'. Hyperreality is, in her terms, faking the process of producing fakes. It is the complete opposite of the situation in Modernism where all the faking was explicitly or implicitly predicated on claims about the originality of the interpretation by the designer. Furthermore, even invented and non-historic artefacts, buildings or places can be seen to carry this quality of the hyperreal. MacDonalds `restaurants' might be an instance: buildings with a corporate identity, based on a non-existent original. Baudrillard often then uses the hyperreal as a metaphor to describe the whole of contemporary culture in which the real and the imagined are becoming entwined in ever more perplexing ways. Of course, the Baroque Era, another age of the simulacra, driven in part by the earlier invention of the printing press, along with the emergence of a secular theatre and the renaissance grasp of perspective, contained many of the same ambiguities, similar games of artifice and a love of performance ± yet all contained within the limits of technical rationality: games were games because they could be measured against the serious business of reality. What is happening today is different in that the media of simulation are different and have quite different political economies. At the same time we live in a global marketplace where the consumer is a much more URBAN DESIGN International

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diverse and powerful, if arguably undemocratically so, force than ever before. According to the values of the market, of course, consumption provides the principal legitimation of the `real'. American/European differences The predisposition for American designers to prefer elaborate copies whilst Europeans prefer abstractions has been discussed; as has the American tendency to treat all of the built environment as a potential source of symbolic meaning, including applied `heraldic' and `informational' elements, not just of buildings but of public spaces themselves. Another of the main differences between the Americas and Europe, for Baudrillard, has been the diversity of peoples who make up the average settlement in the Americas compared with Europe. American settlements have always been composed of immigrants and newcomers, often from other parts of the country; European settlements have, on the other hand, largely consisted of a majority of people whose culture can in some sense be traced back to the geographical location they are in. In America there has been a general tolerance of newcomers and their unfamiliar ways and an expectation that these will translate into features of urban form or, at least into how it is used. In Europe, immigrants and newcomers have been expected to adapt to the dominant culture, at least until recently, where the legitimacy of diasporas is increasingly recognised (Baudrillard, 1988). Americans have thus been more willing to accept that their settlements should become a microcosm of national and international traditions while many Europeans have had a belief that their region and, even their settlement, can be discovered to have an essential visual character in its built form which is unique to itself and which can be found to go far back into history, long before Modernism. Discovering this special essence of `place' has been the bread and butter of urban design related practice for several decades in Europe ± backed up by the townscape and urban morphology approaches. In light of the above, Baudrillard (1988) depicts Americans, `freed by immigration' from obsessive identity with place, as raiding Europe for images and copying them back home to add value to this or that building or development. This addiction to copying or reproduction of buildings and places is condemned as crude and superficial by European intellectuals who are often shocked by URBAN DESIGN International

this version of American promiscuity and its refusal to abstract. In contrast Europeans love abstraction and are consumed with `petty bourgeois needs' to see their region or locality as `special' and thus their society as `unique' by association. Baudrillard also relates these different approaches to their ease of implementation. The American genius is for getting things done and this leads them to prefer the simple unambiguous policy of the copy, while the deep conservatism of European culture and its more complex structures leads Europeans to prefer abstraction, reification and, in as much as these abstractions become more difficult to articulate and implement, the lack of any effective change which flows from it (Baudrillard, 1988). In this sense, Baudrillard saw the phenomenon of the `hyperreal' as essentially American, because of the tendency to make reproductions rather than abstract simulations. The Disney Corporation is, in this sense, quintessentially American. `Disneyland', he said, `is there to conceal the fact that it is the `real' country, all of `real' America¼. Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to move us to believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it is no longer real, but of the order of the hyperreal and of simulation' (quoted in Kellner, 1994). It has been said of Disney's new town of Celebration that it is hyperreal in the sense that it is a `painstaking recreation of a place which never existed' (Sudjic, 1992). There are, however, European versions of this kind of hyperreal, with the centre of South Woodham Ferrars new town in Essex (UK) as a classic example. Yet there is clearly a European version of the `hyperreal', which emerges from a European preference for simulation by abstraction. It leads to what might be called the `hyperabstract-real': an abstraction of an original which never existed. In the twelve years which have elapsed since Baudrillard made these observations about the differences between European and American practice, there has been a distinct merging of the two key differences. In the first place Americans, all over the continent, have `discovered' images in their own backyard and, following similar European motives, have begun to use them and develop codes which require their use (Simmonds et al., 1990). This has led to some interesting

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innovations from which European designers might learn. In the second place European settlements are becoming more and more like the Americas, or English speaking Americas today, with much more mobile national populations and increased waves of immigration. This cultural diversity of population is leading to practices which seek to draw local `stakeholders' into decision making about what new development should look like. This, in turn, is raising questions about the nature of `community' and its relationship to `place' (Albrow et al., 1997). These questions begin to challenge many of the assumptions about place based community, often called today `Nation State Sociology', which urban design practice has previously been so uncritically predicated on ± at least in its aesthetic choices. These practices look set to be the source of much needed new thinking and redefined premises in urban design.

Cases and interpretation Bicester Village (the mall) Bicester Village is an open shopping mall. It is a retail outlet for manufacturing companies, where shoppers can buy high-quality clothing at wholesale prices. It is located outside the main village to the South (Figure 1), close to a junction of the M40 London±Birmingham motorway, which brings in most of its customers. Most of the new housing of this Oxfordshire expansion town is built to the North. The mall is 300 metres from the centre of the village of Bicester (Figure 1): along a footpath through an open recreation area. Almost all the visitors, however, arrive by car ± even the residents of the village. Around the mall, on two sides, is a large parking facility for 1000 cars. The mall, with 62 stores (Figure 4), is growing to the West and will eventually butt up against and probably link into a large Tescos supermarket. Patterns of simulation At first glance it appears that the mall is attempting to simulate the main shopping street of a rural town of the 19th Century. But this rural town is not Bicester, or a typical rural town in Oxfordshire (or even England) but, apparently, of New England (USA). There were, of course, some

Figure 4. Plan of the Mall, with its two entrances leading off the large car park.

broad stylistic themes in common between the two countries in the earlier part of this period. Bicester has been a prosperous little market town, and perhaps for this reason its built form is characterised by a great variety of buildings and public spaces from many different historical periods (Figure 3). Perhaps 30% are from the 19th Century. To simulate the informality, created by individual buildings being built at different times, buildings in the mall step backwards and forwards from the open `street'. To simulate the diversity of buildings of the period, the mall is based on three standard building types; a big house, a little house and a barn. These become standard packages, mostly wooden buildings with minor variations in detail, which are deployed in an apparently random fashion along the street. This focus on building types to convey a sense the diversity of a real place of the period is common in US style neo-traditional design and here it is surprisingly successful. There are some 15 versions of the standard barn, 15 of one kind of standard small house (Figure 5) and 10 of another of the small house type (Figure 6), and 15 of the standard big house type. The big house type bears little resemblance to big houses of the period in New England and is built of brick and plaster, not wood. It is faintly more reminiscent of traditional English houses but of no specific period or region. These are the only buildings visible from outside the mall (Figures 8 and 9) and are, perhaps, in their anonymity meant to act as an interface between the New England street of the mall and the English village of URBAN DESIGN International

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Figure 5. The Mall, showing the `barn' and one `little house' type.

Bicester. They are, in one sense, an example of what are called above the European style of hyper-abstract-real, as is a second small house type in the mall (Figure 6). They represent an abstraction of an image which never existed or which, to be more accurate, is so abstract that it can not be pinpointed to any particular place or time. Untypical of US design, almost all the symbolism in the mall is contained in the form of the buildings and public spaces. There is little applied heraldry, apart from building detail, and no advertising. Even the shop names are small and conform to a strict code. The effect is to focus attention on the window displays. The management forbids taking photographs of these, claiming that it infringes the given store's copyright! In the second paper, discussed above, we compare the mall with an environment in which all the simulation is contained in the applied heraldry and graphics, not the buildings and public spaces: Universal City Walk.

Figure 7. Ralph Lauren store.

patterns of simulation in Bicester Village mall. One is the Ralf Lauren store, the only individual building in the mall, perhaps intended to simulate the Meeting House of the village, on which the clock is fixed and onto which one of the entrances to the mall focuses (Figure 7). Another is the strange tower at the second entrance, whose origin and function is hard to decipher (Figure 9). Both these devices, in their formal layout, conflict with the air of rural informality, typical of both countries in this period, which the mall otherwise simulates so effectively. A third exception, whose function is discussed in the next paper, is the inevitable mascot; here taking the form of a life-sized brown bear, cast in bronze (Figure 11).

There are only three exceptions to the above

Contortions Yet, of course, to create a functioning modern shopping mall out of a rural New England street requires huge distortions of the street. In the first place the street would be four or five times wider than the mall needs to be if it is to create the bustle and intimacy and access to displayed goods, which are required. The street is duly built at 25%

Figure 6. Small house type.

Figure 8. Big house type.

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Figure 9. The second entrance to the Mall.

of its `real' width and is more like a street of the earliest Colonial Period in New England, which had quite different building types and styles. Then, in order to provide adequate space for modern inventories, the ground floors of stores must have four times the area of the average small house of the period. This creates problems with the roof spans, which must be much too flat, and with upper floors which cannot be built into the roof as the image requires. Accordingly the first storeys are faked and the dormer windows are trompe l'oeil (Figure 10). No one lives above the shop these days, not even on Sheep Street, so why waste the space. In the big house types the third floors are usually false. Yet, for all its fakery and contradictions it is rare to meet anyone who does not like being at the Bicester Village mall. Clearly the saving on goods is a draw, but even our urban design students and some of our colleagues, who are trained to be suspicious of such places, confessed to liking it, while wishing it could have been better connected into the town. It is, therefore, appropriate to ask why people like being in the Bicester Village mall.

Figure 10. False windows.

Explanations Given the tenuous nature of the stylistic connection between the mall and the town centre, a first cautious assumption is that the popularity of the mall springs either from the way it functions as an activity setting or from its essentially New England image. The first possibility is addressed in the second paper of this pairing. Here the assumption is that the image is the key. Because few people have visited New England, the imagery can only be familiar to visitors from the many movies they have seen which have been set in New England or places further West, which were inspired by it. To step into the mall is thus to step into a landscape which is familiar yet which suddenly becomes tangible in a new way. Indeed the mall may, by design or accident, have hit on one of the very few images of place, albeit experienced through the medium of film, which all the newcomers who move to this expansion town from all over the world, actually bring with them from their previous experience. Quoting Baudrillard, it was suggested above that the simulacra or copy, in the age of the simulacra, takes on more potency, becomes in a sense more real, than the original. This is not difficult to believe in this case if we accept that the original image of New England was previously experienced by visitors to the mall through the twodimensional medium of film because here it is realised three dimensionally, in bricks and mortar (or actually in timber in this case). A second explanation for the mall's popularity may not lie exactly in its New England imagery ± and certainly not in its hyperabstract English imagery as seen from outside. Rather it might lie in the fact that it is a clever simulation of an informal and diverse rural place, with a clear pattern underlying it, which has grown building by building over time. If the key to the mall's success lies here, European designers and producers of codes have much to learn from the simulation techniques of painstaking recreation of informality and variety, described above. The British company which designed it obviously did. But again it may not be the New England images or the cleverly applied simulation techniques for creating a rural street that can provide the clue to understanding why the mall seems so visually popular. Surprisingly, the answer may lie in the URBAN DESIGN International

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very contortions which the mall has been forced to go through to achieve functionality as a modern-day mall which at the same time resembles a New England street. The false windows and faked upper floors, the very shallow roof pitches, the street widths reduced by 75%, far from diminishing the mall in the eyes of the visitor, may make it yet more `real'. It becomes like a film set, a copy in the medium of bricks and mortar of the physical manifestation of one of the most powerful and glamorous of the simulation media today, film. Of course, if this is correct, it might be supposed that that this was as much accident as the outcome of a deliberate strategy. Yet it is this dimension of fantasy, so closely associated with the movies and increasingly with recreational shopping, that has been evoked here. Similar kinds of interplay between images from the virtual city of information technology and the city of bricks and mortar might well be expected in the future, though of course distorted in new ways by the technology and the political economy of this particular medium of simulation. Baudrillard was fond of quoting Marshall McLuhan (1964) and his claim that the `medium is the message'. Here, in this third interpretation about why the mall is so popular, the question about whether the simulation is derived from an informal and diverse rural place or from a New England place is probably largely irrelevant, as it would have been had the simulation been of traditional Bicester. What is being evoked here is a different and highly potent simulation of a different simulation medium ± film, offering perhaps the potential to participate in it. This is the important message for the visitor. If this is correct it is the important message for designers to grasp, also. It becomes the main theme in the second paper in the following issue, which, building on the work of Irving Goffman, looks at public realm today as providing the `setting' and `props' for `performances' of those who use it. One final interpretation is worth stating: just like the writer of the post-modern novel who insists on treating the reader as a co-conspirator by appearing to discuss choices they are making in the writing of it; so, perhaps, the designers of the mall are inviting the user to acknowledge that the experience being offered is not real; it is theatre and should be acknowledged as such. However, at the same time, its intentions are all too real for URBAN DESIGN International

investors and the risk of their investment, and experienced as real by its users in their engagement with it. The Village of Bicester (Sheep Street) As one of Oxfordshire's formally designated Expansion Towns, Bicester has grown from a population of 7000 to 31 000 in around fifteen years. Accordingly a great deal more effort has gone into upgrading its main shopping area than might otherwise have been the case. Sheep Street (Figures 1 and 12) has been the subject of a number of initiatives; a well-known consultant produced a sensitive design for upgrading the street and considerable resources have also been spent on its implementation. Bicester, as a formally prosperous market town, contains examples of buildings and public spaces from most earlier building and design periods, as discussed (Figure 13). This diversity is the town centre's dominant built form characteristic and Sheep Street is no exception, with its many different scales and styles of building, some badly designed and/or in poor condition. If there is an `authentic original' image, on which developers in the town would normally be asked to base their simulations in today's cultural climate, it is this diversity. The difficulty of articulating its nature and enforcing it probably explains why the local authority has no published design guides for the area, but claims to `treat each building proposal on its merits'. Patterns of simulation Yet while the village is an `authentic original', paradoxically, it has been seeking to simulate in a number of ways its would be simulacra, the Bicester Village mall or places like it. The street, containing something like 60 shops, has been paved and closed to traffic during shopping hours. It thus functions in the daytime as an open pedestrian mall. A large parking facility has been constructed on backland adjacent to the street to serve this `mall' (Figure 12). Contortions Just as the Bicester Village mall was forced to go through fantastic contortions to reconcile a modern shopping mall with a 19th Century New England Street, so Sheep Street has had to go through contortions to become a modern shopping mall. Over time shops have been combined

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and enlarged at the back in order to create sufficient floor areas for modern inventories. In most cases, the stores have become large sheds with little entrance buildings, in many styles and variable quality, stuck on at the street front. Providing a point of entry is often the only function of the original building, where no one appears to be living above the shop today. Many buildings above ground level serve only to carry an image or sign, much in the same way as the upper floor, trompe l'oeil devices in the mall. About 60% of buildings, however, have some commercial activity on upper floors and the large population growth may be in the process of creating a commercial market for such space. A second distortion comes with the perceived width of the street once the traffic had been removed. Though narrower than 19th Century New England streets, Sheep Street is too wide to convey the sense of bustle and intimacy needed for a shopping mall to function effectively. Planters have thus been introduced in the middle of the street where it widens out. These narrow the apparent width of the street and provide formal and informal seating places (Figures 12 and 13). However well designed as planters they are alien elements in an authentic High Street, but common features in the centre of covered malls. While the planters may have had a clear function, they `read', as indeed does the removal of the traffic, as an attempt to simulate a mall at the expense of the authentic originality of the street. It may, indeed, have been a deliberate strategy on the part of the local authority; to turn Sheep Street into a simulation of a mall. This would have been entirely in keeping with the times, it was argued above, where to design a place as a simulacra is to

Figure 11. The bronze bear.

Figure 12. Sheep Street plan.

make it more `real' than the original. The game here is to become, through simulation, more real and potent than the original mall or malls from which the images and functional strategies are drawn. It is, perhaps, a better option today where, to upgrade Sheep Street as an authentic original place, would have placed it on the defensive in relation to places like the Bicester Village mall and Tescos on the urban fringe, which seek to simulate it and, thus, drain the initiative and energy from it. This suspicion that the deliberate strategy has been to simulate a mall is augmented by the

Figure 13. Sheep Street, showing the diversity of buildings, the planters and the paving. URBAN DESIGN International

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something else, like that great commercial enemy of the High Street, the out-of-town mall.

Figure 14. The clock.

addition of a freestanding clock (Figure 14) and what appears to be a mascot in the form of a huddle of four sheep cut out of stone (Figure 15). The symbolic function of the sheep, a reminder of the street's past, is different from that of the bear in Bicester Village (Figure 11). But, both clock and mascot are, of course, de rigeur in a mall. In an interesting way, then, there has been little attempt to establish the identity of Sheep Street as an `authentic original' place, other than by adding street lights evoking the era of gas-lighting, and flower baskets on what resemble giant candelabra. Even if the buildings had been of a high standard, it would have been a difficult task. It could also have backfired as a strategy because today originals tend to lose status to their simulacra. It is a far better strategy to become oneself a simulacra and steal the clothes of

At the same time the local authority is attempting to manage how the image of the street evolves over time through its development control function. They have produced no special design guide or design brief, no formal code of any kind, but they treat each planning application `on its merits'. This looks like a sensible strategy because of the variety of buildings and public spaces in the town. As an Oxfordshire expansion town, one would imagine the great diversity of people who have come to live here prefer this variety of styles and types and would resist, as a group, any attempt to nail the town to a future based on a few selected images, which would inevitably be quite arbitrary or exceedingly abstract and impossible to implement effectively. But the question remains, what does `treating on its merits' actually mean? Surely, just for the sake of efficiency, there must be some in-house ground rules about how the visual character of proposed new development is responded to. Unless the local authority wanted to be permanently in the Appeals Court, there must be ground rules for making sure its decisions are at least `consistent' over time. There must, in other words, be an `informal code' at work within the local authority. Was it the informal code which led to the nondescript `hyper-abstract-real English style' buildings being built around the mall perhaps seeking to shield its New England style from public view? Is there a special informal code to manage how the visual character of Sheep Street evolves over time and what decision rules does it contain?

Summary The purpose of this paper has been to examine a number of related concepts, grouped loosely under the heading of `the hyperreal'. These concepts have then been `tested' by using them to speculate about the two case studies, contrasting and comparing them in the process.

Figure 15. The `mascot'. URBAN DESIGN International

Bicester Village, the mall, is trying to simulate a rural shopping street and reconcile this with the required function of a mall. The Village of Bicester is trying to simulate a shopping mall and reconcile this with its main rural shopping street,

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Sheep Street. Both management teams appear to have spotted the idea that, in today's consumer climate, it is always better to be the `active' simulator rather than the `passive' simulated. The simulation immediately becomes more `real' than its original, in a sense stealing its clothes and using them in new and more productive ways. This, of course, is creating dilemmas for the strictest kind of conservationist, though it might not with the more liberal. The built environment becomes itself a simulation medium, the `medium of bricks and mortar'. Like all media, it has its strengths and weaknesses which flow from its technical character and also from its political economy; in terms of the way people use it to make profit. Americans have a long history of using this medium in different ways from Europeans. They prefer to simulate by copying while Europeans prefer to simulate by abstracting. Copying enables certain features of environment like informality and diversity to be more effectively simulated, techniques used to great effect in the mall, though this copying is based on a shrewd level of analysis (the three building types). In one sense it doesn't matter what is being simulated as long as the simulation is effective: the medium, and the ability to use it effectively, is the message for consumers and thus designers. Other media, most particularly film or television, often simulate the built environment and people `experience' it today through these media as well as directly. As the `virtual cities' of interactive information technology emerge, they will become new and more powerful media of simulation and interpretation, with their own strengths and weaknesses as media and their own political economy. Urban designers must begin to grasp this emerging situation not run from it, as they tend to do. Just as other media simulate the built environment, so the medium of bricks and mortar begins to simulate images from other media, including images of the built environment. In the mall it is even suggested that the apparent attempt to simulate a film set, or the effect of accidentally having simulated one may actually make the mall more potent, more `real' in terms of today's market, where the public realm and its function is increasingly one of acting as setting and props for the performance of its users. In a rather

different way, the medium once again is the message for the consumer and thus the designer. It is here that can be detected in post-modernism a deep but not particularly obvious preoccupation with technology, because it is simulation that is the dominant technical mode of the age. Finally, all this interpretation aimed at different consumer groups and translation back and forth between different simulation media with their own particular distortions, where the preoccupation is often more with the medium and its use than with the message, means that it is impossible today to pinpoint `real' authentic originals in today's cultural climate. Identifying the authentic was never easy in earlier periods but today, where the simulacra has taken on more potency than the original, it hardly seems worth the effort. As long as the simulation is acceptable for the identified consumer group, who cares where it came from! But it must `appear' to be a simulation. This seems to be the one defining requirement and is at the root of Baudrillard's specific use of the term `hyperreal'; the production of images, which seem to be simulations of an existing or earlier reality which never actually existed. The phenomenon of the copy without an original. But Baudrillard and many others use the term `hyperreal' is a more general way also; referring to the fact that in today's cultural climate, not least because of the issues we have been addressing in this paper, there are no accepted ways of judging authenticity other than consumer acceptance of the simulation which is offered. In the cultural climate of Modernism, traditional buildings and public places would be conserved because it was inconceivable that they would ever be repeated, and there were accepted criteria for determining what was worth preserving. Today these traditional buildings and public places are being constantly replicated, while any criteria for discriminating between the `authentic' and something other than that have lost all credibility. Thirty-five years ago Baudrillard was one of the first to notice and celebrate this climactic change. Urban designers often appear, of course, not to have accepted this major premise of the Post Modern condition and tend to cling to a Modernist faith in connoisseurship and the ultimate `authenticity' of the neo-traditionalist agenda which many are so drawn to. It is for this reason, for better or for worse, that they often seem to be intellectually at odds with the age in which they live. URBAN DESIGN International

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