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Interesting article with sociocultural and yes, political overtones
from the next issue of the International version of Newsweek. kwc It's a Mall World
after all By Mac
Margolis, Newsweek International,
Dec. 05, 2005 Issue When the Los Angeles
firm Altoon + Porter Architects set out to design a shopping arcade in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, a few years ago, it faced a delicate mission: to raise a glitzy
pleasure dome full of Western temptations in the maw of fundamentalist Islam.
Not that the Saudis were consumer innocents; King Khalid airport in Riyadh
fairly hums with wealthy Arabs bound for the lavish shops of Paris and London.
But the trick was to lure women buyers—the royalty of retail—who are not
allowed to shed their veils in public. "Women
can't be expected to buy anything if they can't try it on,"
says architect Ronald Altoon, managing partner of the firm. So Altoon + Porter
came up with an ecumenical solution: the Kingdom Centre, a three-story
glass-and-steel Xanadu of retail with an entire floor—Women's Kingdom—devoted
exclusively to female customers. "We
took the veil off the women and put it on the building," says
Altoon. The modest proposal
paid off. In Women's Kingdom, Saudi women can shop, schmooze, dine or even loll
about at the spa without upsetting the sheiks or subverting Sharia, the
country's strict Islamic laws. Normally the third level of any mall is a dud, but it's
become the most profitable floor in the whole arcade. The Kingdom Centre may not be
revolutionary; no one is burning veils at the food court. Still, it represents a small but meaningful freedom
for Saudi women.
And its success points to the irrepressible global appetite for consumer
culture, as well as to the
growing role that the right to shop plays in fostering democratization and
development. It's been more than
two decades since John
B. Hightower,
the director of New York City's South Street Seaport Museum, a combination
cultural center and shopping arcade, brazenly declared that "shopping is the chief cultural activity of the United
States." Since then, it has also become one of America's chief
exports: shopping malls, once a peculiarly American symbol of convenience and
excess, now dot the global landscape from Santiago to St. Petersburg and Manila
to Mumbai. In 1999, India boasted only three malls. Now there are 45, and the number
is expected to rise to 300 by 2010. The pint-size Arab Emirate of Dubai,
sometimes known as the Oz of malls, clocked 88.5 million mall visitors last
year; nearly 180 million Brazilians mob shopping arcades every month—almost as
many as in the United States. Where elephants and giraffes once gamboled along
the Mombasa road leading into Nairobi, the African mall rat is now a far more
common sight, with four gleaming new malls to scavenge in at the Kenyan capital
and three more in the works. And no one can keep pace with China, where foreign
investors are scrambling to get a piece of a real-estate boom driven in part by
mall mania. "The same energy and
dynamism that the shopping industry brought to North America 30, 40 years ago
is now reaching overseas," says Michael Kercheval, head of the
International Council of Shopping Centers, an industry trade association and
advisory group. "Now it's reached the global masses." Indeed, the planet appears deep in the grip of the
retail version of an arms race. For years, the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Canada, with
20,000 parking spaces, an ice-skating rink, a miniature-golf course and four
submarines (more than in the Canadian Navy) on display, had reigned as the
grandest in the world. Last October it was overtaken by the $1.3 billion Golden
Resources Shopping Center in northwest Beijing, with 20,000 employees and
nearly twice the floor space of the Pentagon. Developers in Dubai are breaking
ground on not one but two malls they claim will be even bigger, one of which
boasts a man-made, five-run ski slope. Yet all these have been eclipsed by the
behemoth South
China Mall,
which opened its doors in the factory city of Dongguan this year. By the end of
the decade, China is likely to have at least seven of the world's 10 largest
malls—many of them equipped with hotels, on the theory that no one can possibly
see everything in a single day. To those who malign
malls as the epitome of all that is wrong with American culture, their spread
is like a pestilenceupon the land. Dissident scholars churn out one dystopian
tract—"One Nation Under Goods," "The Call of the
Mall"—after another. Critics despair of whole nations willing to cash in
their once vibrant downtowns and street markets for a wasteland of jerry-built
nowhere, epic traffic jams and marquees ablaze with fatuous English names
(Phoenix High Street, Palm Springs Life Plaza and Bairong World Trade Center
Phase II). To some, this is an assault on democracy itself. "Shopping malls are great for dictatorships,"
says Emil Pocock, a professor of American studies at Eastern Connecticut State
University, who takes students on field trips to malls to study consumer
society. "What better way to control
folks than to put them under a dome and in enclosed doors?" The
"malling of America," in the words of author and famous mall-basher
William Kowinski, has become the malling of the world. As it turns out, that
may not be such a bad thing. Rather than presage or hasten the decline of the
traditional downtown, as many critics fear, the rise of the mall is actually
serving as a catalyst
for growth,
especially in
developing nations.
In China, the booming retail sector has sucked in a fortune in venture capital
and spawned dozens of joint ventures with international investors looking to
snap up Chinese urban properties. In late July, the Simon Property Group, a
major U.S. developer, teamed up with Morgan Stanley and a government-owned
Chinese company to launch up to a dozen major retail centers throughout China
over the next few years. Malls are a leading force in driving India's $330
billion retailing industry, which already accounts for a third of national GDP
and recently overtook Russia's. Similarly, a burst of consumer spending in the
Philippines—thanks to overseas nationals who send between $6 billion and $7
billion back every year—has fueled a real-estate boom, led by megamalls. Most developing-world malls are integrated
in the heart of the inner cities instead of strewn like beached whales along
arid superhighways.
"In China, 80 percent of shoppers walk to the mall," says Kercheval
of the ICSC. In some megacities, including New Delhi, Nairobi and Rio, urban
sprawl has flung customers into outlying neighborhoods, many of which spring up
around brand-new shopping centers. That means malls are no longer catering just
to the elite. "We used to talk exclusively about A-class shoppers,"
says Kercheval. "Now we are seeing the arrival of B-, C- and D-class
customers. The developing-world mall is becoming more democratic." In many places, malls are welcome havens
of safety and security.
In Rio, where teenagers (especially young men) are the main victims of street
crime, parents breathe easier when they know their kids are at play in the
mall, some of which deploy 100 or more private police. "Safety is one of
our biggest selling points," says Paulo Malzoni Filho, president of the
Brazilian Association of Shopping Centers. "When I enter into one of these
malls, it feels like I have landed in a foreign country," says Parag
Mehta, a regular at the Inorbit mall in the busy northern Mumbai suburb of
Malad. And as malls break new
ground around the world, the one-size-fits-all business model created in North
American suburbia is giving way to regionalized versions. Malls may conjure up
the specter of a flood of U.S. brands and burgers, but in reality, local
palates and preferences often prevail. On a recent evening in Beijing's Golden
Resources Shopping Center, Kentucky Fried Chicken and Papa John's were nearly
deserted, while the Korean restaurant just around the corner was packed. Chile
has long welcomed foreign investors, yet the leading retailers at malls in
Santiago are two local chains, Falabella and Almacenes Paris. In San Salvador,
capital of El Salvador, the Gallerias shopping arcade houses a Roman Catholic
church that holds mass twice a day—an intriguing metaphysical twist on the
concept of the anchor store. In many developing countries, malls have attracted
banks, art galleries, museums, car-rental agencies and even government services
such as passport offices and motor-vehicle departments, becoming de facto villages instead of just shopping centers. For residents of the
developing world, malls increasingly serve as surrogate civic centers, encouraging social values that go
beyond conspicuous spending. China is home to some 168 million smokers, but
they are not allowed to partake at the smoke-free malls. That's not the only
environmental plus; many Chinese malls are equipped with a soft-switching
system that stabilizes the electrical current and conserves energy. In the
Middle East, arcades such as Riyadh's Kingdom Centre are among the few public
spaces where women can gather, gab or just walk about alone in public. "Malls are not just places to shop, they are places to
imagine," says Xia Yeliang, a professor at Beijing University's
School of Economics. "They bring
communities together that might not
otherwise encounter one another and create new communities." For some societies,
malls even offer a communal respite from the past. In Warsaw, where World War
II demolished most of the historic shopping district—and dreary chockablock
communist-era architecture finished the job—one of the most revered public
spaces around is the local mall. "For decades Poles dressed up for Sunday
mass," says Grzegorz Makowski, a sociologist at Warsaw University and
expert on consumer culture. "Now they dress for a visit to the shopping
mall." Still, for some critics, no amount of
social or economic development can hide the fact that all modern malls are at
heart temples of rampant consumerism. Jan Gehl, a leading Danish champion of urban renaissance
and a professor of architecture at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in
Copenhagen, likes to show his students pictures of malls around the world and
ask them where each one is located. Many look so indistinguishable that they
can't tell. (Only now are some clues beginning to appear.) Even Victor Gruen,
the Viennese Jewish emigre who fled Hitler's Europe and created the first
indoor-shopping arcade in the Minneapolis suburbs in the 1950s, eventually grew
disgusted by the soulless concrete-box-with-parking monstrosities rendered in
his name. "I refuse to pay alimony to
these bastards of development," he growled during a 1978 speech
in London, fleeing back to Europe. By then there was no escape; malls were
already marching on the Old World. Half a century on,
some of the resistance to malls speaks more to nostalgia for an illusory past
than a rejection of the present. Ancient Turkey certainly had its bazaar rats.
And what is the contemporary shopping center if not a souk with a cineplex?
"Maybe the mall is just a modern and more comfortable version of what has
always been," says Stephen Marshall of the Young Foundation, a London
think tank. "It's quite possible the ancients would have seen our malls
have seen our malls with all that technology as terrific places." Certainly mall
developers seem to have learned from their early excesses. Instead of garish
bunkers with blind walls and plastic rain forests, newer malls boast sculpture
gardens, murals, belvederes and gentle lighting. Lush creepers, great ferns,
cacti and feathery palms tumble down the interior of the Fashion Mall, a
boutique arcade, in Rio de Janeiro. The Kingdom Centre in Riyadh won an
international design award in 2003. And while "big" may still be
beautiful in mallworld, more and more developers are launching arcades built to modest scale,
deliberately emulating yesterday's main streets or the Old World piazzas they
replaced. This
may not be the much-vaunted consumer's arcadia the mallmeisters had always
hoped for, but global
malls seem oddly to come closer to the bold democratic ideal than the originals ever did. And when it
rains, everybody stays dry. With
Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi, Sumeet Chatterjee in Mumbai, Quindlen Krovatin in
Beijing, Joanna Kowalska-Iszkowska in Warsaw, William Underhill in London and
Alexandra Polier in Nairobi http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10217695/site/newsweek/ |
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