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Kind: captions
Language: en

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Let me tell you about a man called Victor
Gruen.

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Born in Austria, he moved to the United States

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just before the Second World War broke out

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and became an architect.

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And he looked at the suburban sprawl that
was taking over America

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all the people just commuting back and forth,
back and forth

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between home and work in their cars, and thought
that what they needed

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was something like the old city centres and
downtowns that he knew.

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What he needed was a city centre for the suburban
sprawl

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and what he came up with was the idea for
the shopping mall.

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'Course, he had some more utopian vision for
it.

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He thought, oh, this is going to be wonderful,

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there's going to be homes, and shops, and
schools, and even hospitals,

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all working together and being this new space.

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Unfortunately, money and politics got in the
way of his utopian visions

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and what you ended up with, twenty years later
when the idea crossed the Atlantic,

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was this: Brent Cross Shopping Centre,

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described by a friend of mine as "Hell on
Earth on a Saturday".

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It's the reason I've been driving around looking
for a parking space for about half an hour.

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Now, Victor Gruen did not want this.

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He did not want these temples to consumerism

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with every psychological trick in the book
designed to get you to buy.

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One of those psychological tricks got named
after him:

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the Gruen Transfer, the idea that there are
a few seconds after you walk in

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with all this new stimulus, where your brain
just gets a little bit confused

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and almost hypnotises you into buying more.

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Doesn't matter whether it's true -- it's probably
not, the evidence is shaky,

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but what matters: it was named after him.

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And at that point, he was railing against
what he called

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these "bastard" offspring of his original
idea.

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Well, this is what we've ended up with.

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He died in 1980, at a point where there was
a new shopping mall

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opening in the United States roughly every
week or so.

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Which was not what he wanted...

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...but things have changed.

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Economic downturns and the rise of the internet

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mean that now a lot of those old malls are
closing down.

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And the new spaces that are popping up in
their path?

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They're a lot more like his original designs.

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They're pedestrianised high streets, and they're
big, open spaces

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with actual space to sit down that isn't just
convincing you to buy.

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From beyond the grave, Victor Gruen might
have the last laugh.

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Not that that helps me, when that guy just
took the last parking space.

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