Mega city of shopping malls

Inside view of a grand Dhaka city shopping mall.

Their words reminded me of the funny character Homer Simpson in the popular American cartoon serial The Simpsons, who said: "For an evening or a week, there's no place like the mall. Food, fun and fashion -- the mall has it all!"

That's the problem. The mall isn't just a space in which to consume -- it consumes us, wraps us in a comfortably exciting world of commerce. At Dhaka's new found prime shopping destination, Bashundhara City, a huge box-like structure, unsympathetic to its surroundings, thrust skyward arrogantly, advertising through its huge glass panel "punches" in technicolour the many thrills inside: "dining, home-wares, fashion, entertainment," and most interestingly, "escape."

So out of curiosity, one fine evening I went there with my family to check it out myself. What I found is nothing surprising. It is the sort of common prototype mega mall that mushroomed in South East Asian cities a decade or so earlier and now the style has been imported (wholesale!) into Dhaka (thanks to our architects who now have easy access to South East Asian cities).

Every detail of the mall reflects the stereotype mega mall design to maximize the potential to spend. The maze of corridors is so designed that orienteering experience is necessary to navigate from one end to the other. Coffee/fast-food shops are placed at levels known as "food court" to revive you on your shopping journey, while a profusion of tastefully arranged posters and aromas of cosmetics conspire to excite senses and keep those spending glands pumping.

So how does a mega shopping mall fit in the urban landscape of our Dhaka city? How does it stack up in people's way of life? And what does Dhaka's landscape, dotted with so many malls, say about the way we operate as a community? While mall owners buy into the language of community and the concept of "the public," the mall itself seems to speak in a different tongue. From the architecture and interior design to policing and legal practices, the mall speaks, not of inclusion and diversity, but of control and consumption. It is not so much a public space as an arena on loan to the public for the purposes of corporate profit.

The developers of shopping malls like to think of themselves as providing "public space." But this "public space" isn't owned by the public anymore; it has become private property, been concreted over, and is patrolled by security guards keeping the "riff-raff" out. Is this what we want from our public space? Is it good for our cities? Do our policy makers in the government as well as planners/architects understand the consequences of submitting to the corporate ethos?

The notion of public space can be traced back to the agora (not Agora the departmental chain in Dhaka!) or market place of ancient Greece. The agora was a place of meeting, an open space where public affairs and legal disputes were conducted. It was also a place of pleasurable jostling, where citizens' bodies, words, actions, and produce were all literally on display. Thus, the market place was essential to the political community, because it was where the people exchanged ideas, gossip and opinions, as well as money.

In the idle moments between building wooden horses, creating marble columns and inventing the theatre, beard-stroking ancient Greeks were asking uncomfortable questions about the way society fitted together, and how to make it work better. It's on these ancient foundations that we base our notion of the public -- along with most of our ideas about politics, such as equality, community, and democracy.

Modern political theorists, who spend their time working out what makes democracies tick, tend to agree with the ancients on the importance of the marketplace. Thankfully though, they've updated Aristotle's original contention that women were beyond the pale, foreigners were uncouth barbarians, and slaves were an integral part of good household management. These days, we like to think of ourselves as a little more enlightened, and extend equal treatment and equal rights to all our citizens irrespective of their social class.

The influential German social theorist Jurgen Habermas believes that for the public sphere to work well in a democratic society, it must be open and diverse. In other words, a public space should not exclude: it should invite all manner of people, and the widest range of social interactions and social activities possible for a healthy urban life.

That today's mega shopping malls are intended to make us part with our cash is not much of a revelation, but it does tell us that we are far from the diverse democratic marketplace of which Habermas speaks. The very nature of the mall speaks volumes about social structure and interactions in our consumer society. Its aesthetic focus is entirely internal. Inside, we have a hermetically sealed, temperature-controlled consumer fantasy of shiny surfaces and sparkling white goods. But outside, we encounter "an ungainly pile of over-sized boxes plunked down in the middle of an enormous asphalt sea," according to Harvard urban design professor and mall sociologist Margaret Crawford.

Here, she is describing the American mall, but our Dhaka city's new mega malls have imported the format pretty much wholesale. For example, Bashundhara City fits the profile perfectly as a bewildering labyrinth of concrete, aluminium, and glass panels, jagged into an oversized ungainly concrete box with huge mouth for swallowing cars.

Susan Christopherson, another noted sociologist of malls, argues that shopping centres are constructed to form a predictable, controlled environment "which acts like a prison in reverse: to keep deviant behaviour on the outside." The "deviants" are generally the common public who do not fit into today's consumer culture. As far as mall owners are concerned, this is business. They have a legal obligation to maximize returns to their shareholders, and the whole science of mall design is geared to this end. Anything that might disrupt the smooth flow of commerce must be excluded.

We are experiencing a steady increase in social segregation among different classes of our community caused by "market forces." We are witnessing the accentuated development of separate suburbs for the rich and poor, gated communities and slums. By law, mall owners and their security guards can exclude "undesirables" at will. Gone are the days when we used to hear sweet voice from young hawkers trying to sell his/her small items to potential customers in our traditional market places (remember New Market?). But these hawkers or "tokais," whatever you call them, are now the "undesirables" in today's mega malls. After all, these undesirables have no right to be there, and are unable to show a "lawful reason" for being on mall premises.

While mall owners appeal to ideas of community in selling their developments, it is a very particular version of community: one whose diversity is controlled in the interests of commerce and the sheltering of middle-class fears.

The very concept of shopping mall does not encourage social inclusion which sharply contrasts with the concept of the market place that originated in ancient Greece. In a world where we shut ourselves off from difference, community withers. This alien shopping mall epitomizes this shutting off. It is designed to insulate consumers from those who do not fit into consumer culture. As we barricade ourselves in gated communities patrolled by private security forces, screen visitors with video-phones, mall owners swell their coffers by building fortress-malls, and marketing them as a "safe and secure" environment in which to shop.

And just like our individual fortresses, the fortress of the shopping mall repels those who come without a valid visa: the non-citizens of our consumer culture. As we indulge ourselves in this consumer culture, we don't feel any moral obligation towards those vast non-citizens of consumer culture. So, for our modern Dhaka city, the shopping malls are today's "public space" only for the new consumer citizens. That's quite an impressive progress for a third world democratic country like Bangladesh!

Sardar Masud Karim is an architect and urban planner, currently working for the Department of Planning (DoP), NSW government, Australia.