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by Jayanthi Liyanage

Why do people come to malls? What attracts them to patronise these urban glamour zones?

Liberty Plaza, the first mall in Colombo.

Is it the city-savvy merchandise? Or, the glitter images of metro citadel lifestyles? Or, the convergence of all that and more under one roof? Whatever their lure is, malls have rarely ceased to inveigle droves of urban populations to gaze at or savour what is offered on their tinsel platters.

To those with purchasing power, malls are "holy temples of consumerism." To the aspiring urbanites and suburbanites at large, they are magical transnational spaces, whipped up in the process of globalisation, or to be more accurate, "glocalisation". They are also strategic spaces, brimming with new economic and political potential, projecting transnational images and identities to not only those with power to buy but also to the powerless. For, that snappy instant they wander through these "indoor streets" or "images markets" of malldom, could be the only time they could "live" the dream of being an actor in the citadels of cosmopolidom.

At a recent research session at the University of Colombo, Sasanka Perera of its Department of Sociology touched on the subject of malls as a contested discourse in development.

He said that malls in the USA serve a need in the American imagination to preserve and celebrate the past in full-scale, while also focusing on something for the future. "But the Sri Lankan example of a mall is something which has no point of reference to the past, present or future," he noted, adding, "They are an imported idea which has not been explored. But that unexplored condition has been accepted by us as reality."

Odel, projecting a new concept of image marketing.

Toronto-based John Barber writes that malls have remade cities, transforming the purchasing chore into one of society's most popular leisure pursuits. "They are more than reigning architectural symbols of their age. They are among the most important public institutions as well."

The invention of the "enclaved" shopping mall 33 years ago in suburban Minneapolis, is considered a triumph of good social planning over what was accepted earlier as good business sense.

When the Architect Victor Gruen, designed Southdale Shopping Centre, the first one to incorporate two department stores, his intention was to "create a gracious enclave where suburbanites would get out of their cars and meet each other," and cultivate social life. He wanted to create face-to-face interactions, which he thought was lost in the USA, in an aritifical population within a mall. Yet, Barber writes that Gruen became the bitterest critic of this new selling machine when it gave way to "lobster trap" malls concentrating on selling power.

Toronto retail analyst, John Winter, says malls are money machines and the greatest annuity known to humankind. "You build one and then you pass every single one of your costs on to your tenants. That's why so many of them are built." As malls generate more traffic than tenants could expect from a street location, they pay up happily.

Perera spoke of a survey which revealed that a local mall had monthly visits from 80 per cent of its young and 100 per cent of its unemployed women. "The unemployed does not have money and if consumption of goods is not taking place, what is happening?" In the process of development, malls have become amphi-theatres where people go to consume images and spaces "in a landscape where many of the things we want to achieve remain underachieved or under threat. When you enter a mall, you enter from your world into another world."

Malls have also become centre-spots where people go to find out what is happening in fashion, social circles and to acquaint themselves with new friends. An added lure is the ample parking space and shelter and comfort from the vagaries of weather. For example, the Majestic City lounge is probably the only place in the heart of Colombo where men and women could sit and enjoy a respite from their busy city schedules. It is also a sort of a "dating centre" of teenagers and young people, mostly young men, hanging around to be noticed and to notice the objects of their desires. As Barber writes, in the absence of any other public planned spaces, malls have become "the accidental capitals of suburbia."

Yet, some malls do not encourage lingering in a bid to evict "undesirable." In the USA, such restriction has led to drafting new trespass laws defining malls as quasi-public spaces, constraining the right of mall-owners to evict. Architect Barry Sampson, taking malls as an element of the changing anthropological condition of suburbia, says, "The shopping centre began as a market device but now it has become an institution, being subject to all the pressures associated with public space."

This evolution is also reflected in the genealogy of Colombo malls begun with the advent of Liberty Plaza, projecting the glitter of consumerism, leading the social-consumerism of Majestic City.

Malls are also said to be striking capsules of social separation which let men and women with money "walk over the heads of the poor." How the stratification of market has spread its dividing arms to the society is evident by which social strata frequents which mall.

An exclusivity is reflected at Crescat and Odel, which share a upmarket patronage both local and foreign.

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