Monocle magazine editor Tyler Brule has enlisted Alain de Botton and myriad others in an all-media-form effort to halt development of the White City Mall in West London. The enormous, shed-like structure is now being thrown down just west of the Shepherd’s Bush roundabout by Westfield, the Australian property developer. De Botton, in the current issue of Monocle, deems the plan unsightly, at odds with current shopping trends, and a disaster that will blight the area for the next two hundred years. Not to be outdone, Brule in his Sunday column in the Financial Times, identifies the development as the prime example of one of the most respected nations in the world bludgeoning its own brand. Together, in a video podcast available on I-Tunes, they extend the attack. Radio and sky-writing campaigns (“Surrender Westfield”) are now in the planning stages. De Botton cites architect Richard Rogers’s argument that the network of dormitory villages, office parks and shopping precincts connected by vast motorways should give way to the 19th century model of an integrated city, where sleeping, eating, consuming and working are fused into a vibrant whole.

They’re right. As urban theorist and former mayor of Bogota Enrique Penalosa opines: “When malls become meeting places, it’s a sign that a city is sick.”