Shopping ('Town') Centres

Town Centre eh? Well; no, frankly. Generally town centres tend not to have doors at either end of them, cctv everywhere, security guards everywhere or be totally enclosed by walls and roofs. You could have a protect march in an actual town centre - can you imagine the farmers of Ireland driving their livestock through the malls in Dundrum 'Town Centre' to demonstrate against agriculture cuts? I don't really object to the roofs, although alot more glass so we could see out maybe would be nice; i object to almost everything else about the damn things though. As someone who prefers my town centres to actually be the centre of towns I am both confused and annoyed by the naming of almost every bloody one of the retail driven negative social experiment that is the shopping bloody mall as 'town centre'. There is only one thing worse than a shopping mall; a multi storey shopping mall (sorry, multi storey town centre). I was present when the idea of naming one of the first ones a town centre was come up with - what a great day for the citizens of Ireland that was. Why, why, why? Must we really continue to copy the worst ideas that other retail/materialistic countries come up with? Now the mainland Europeans, they know how to do Town Centres (mind you i suppose alot of them have the weather for it) - they actually care about life in their (actual) town centres, and encourage and develop it. In Copenhagen in the colder months the cafes provide blankets for the outside seats; in Cologne they put glass roofs over actual streets; in Rome, well, its Rome. A detailed objection of shopping centres (and i have to confess i have been involved in the design of a number of these things and i'm pretty good at them) is that it removes to a large degree the ability of someone to people watch as you have a coffee or lunch etc. Wheres the fun in being in a cafe if you can't watch the world go by and pass remarks about everyone. Lets look more towards the cities of Europe for our solutions and find a better way to adapt things to the weather than the shopping experience as Sunday family outing. (In Dertopia there would be town centres like Seville, Rome, Sienna........)