Cult hysteria: Third mall from the sun

It is a well-documented fact that Jakartans don't seem to be able to get enough of shopping malls. Despite the half-million- odd plazas that have already opened their deodorized doors to the capital's swelling masses, more are being built all the time. Current drains on the country's precarious cement reserves can be seen under construction in both Senayan and behind the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle, and all this in spite of the fact that these areas already house two malls a piece.

Yes, Jakartans love their malls. They encapsulate the pride and hubris of the nation's bright, new, free market future. Well, that is what the mall developers would have us believe at any rate. However, this affection for malls would appear, to this correspondent at least, to be a developer's self-fulfilling prophecy. If people have nowhere else to go in their leisure time other than malls, where are they going to end up? If someone had the vision and bravery to build a sports center, a theater, an art house or even a park instead of another plaza, are we to believe that no one would go to them?

I am not here to bemoan the city's woeful lack of public space, however, and perhaps the mall has indeed won the battle for the 21st century Jakartan soul. A thousand years hence, cyborg archaeologists and anthropologists will unearth Jakarta's great plazas, along with petrified Starbucks beakers and mobile phone casings, and pontificate on what a strange religion their ancestors practiced in these places. They will theorize upon what mysteries lie behind these modernist temples that will seem to them as exotic as those of the Aztecs or the Pharoahs.

If anything, the cult of the mall became even more entrenched in the city's collective consciousness with the opening of Cilandak Town Square (or CiToS as it is colloquially known) about three years ago. In the Town Square, shops have been replaced by cafes and restaurants and the last vestiges of mall functionality have been eradicated completely in favor of lifestyle hedonism. Going to the mall has now become an end itself and the Town Square is perpetually filled with youngsters hanging out, sipping cappuccinos and enjoying the 120-decibel racket of top 40 cover bands playing in the lobby.

Cafes such as Starbucks, Excelso, Brew & Co. and Mister Bean (ha, ha), restaurants like Mykonos, Izzi Pizza, Tartine and Fish & Co., plus a cinema and two bars, have insured the massive success of the Town Square. The fact that it was built in an area of town housing the kind of people who have the largest disposable incomes to spend there hasn't harmed it either. To be fair though, the Town Square is a not an unpleasant place in which to drink a cup of overpriced coffee; its open-plan, doorless design being similar to a classic European shopping arcade.

The trouble is, CiToS' runaway success has illuminated dollar signs in the eyes of other developers who also want a piece of the non-retail leisure mall action. So now the cafe and restaurant-filled Town Square concept has been reproduced, with mixed results, in, for example, Dharmawangsa City Walk, just off Jl. Fatmawati in South Jakarta, which is an apocalypse of Greco- Roman statuettes and mock Elizabethan lamp standards. Town Squares have also begun to spring up outside of town. There is Serpong Town Square (SeToS), Depok Town Square (DeToS) and Malang Town Square (MaToS). Where will it all end? With no one giving a flying ToS presumably.

Let us also not forget the dark side of all this relentless mall expansion, a side that lies beneath the surface of all this ersatz fun.

During the construction of CiTos, for example, three houses on Jl. TB Simatupang were bulldozed despite the residents' ownership of the land on which they stood and the fact that they had lived there for 37 years. To be fair, the compulsory appropriation of private land for public projects, an issue hitting the headlines at the moment in Indonesia, is something that happens in all countries. However, when combined with the corruption and shaky legal system that exist here, you have to feel sorry for the poor poor people who are turfed out of their homes in order to make way for more malls.

Demolish the town to build the town square, a strange idea indeed. There is no standing in the way of progress though and soon we'll all be living, eating, sleeping and dreaming in a mall. I have seen the future -- and it is cappuccino colored.

--Simon Pitchforth