To say that Bluewater is enormous does not do it justice. It sits at the bottom of a huge chalk crater, its malls laid out in a vast triangle, its shimmering sequence of domed roofs giving it the appearance of a moon city. All around it are the 13,000 car parking spaces for the expected 30 million visits a year it will receive. Bluewater tries - my, how it tries - to be architecture, but in reality it is a three-dimensional planning diagram crossed with a set of actuarial calculations.

The people who dreamed it up - Australian developers and American architects - know exactly who is going to go there, where we live, how much we will spend when we get there. They know which of the three malls will appeal to which people, how many of us will stop to see a film, how many of us will hang out in the big glasshouse part or the town square part. They know all this, they know it will be a resounding success, they know the yield they will get on their investment. Which - it may surprise you to learn - is also your investment, since it is highly likely that part of your pension or your PEP is parked in Bluewater. It cost £370m to build. Even before it opened, it was valued at £1.12 billion. These places do not just attract money: they are money.

Not that the begetters of Bluewater would acknowledge for an instant that theirs is like any ordinary shopping centre. It is a "new generation retail environment", they say. Eric Kuhne, its architect, is a big amiable bear of a man who waxes evangelical about his creation. "None of this is new, if you think of it as a resort," he says as we pace the malls, "but as a shopping centre, it changes the equation for ever." I disagree: for years, shopping malls have gradually been acquiring more and more unshoplike things - cafes, cinemas, health clubs, playgrounds - and Bluewater represents a continuing evolution, not a revolution.