Unique Kuta shopping space awaits 2nd chance

Fransiska Prihadi, Architect, Legian, Bali

A stroll down the Legian-to-Kuta road was a toddling walk between shops, cafes and hotels. One could automatically recall the famous cynical phrase that Bali was becoming "an island of a thousand shop houses" instead of what it used to be, "an island of a thousand temples".

But trying to close one's eyes to this fact is a useless attempt. It seems unavoidable that the shopping concept in Bali is one of the major factors that could boost local and national economic growth; and Kuta was an interesting application of the Indonesian shopping concept.

As a district, Kuta consists of the three desa adat, or customary villages, of Kuta, Legian and Seminyak. The district was once a rural area that has now been interconnected by the linear urban thoroughfare of Jl. Raya Kuta-Jl. Raya Legian-Jl. Raya Seminyak. The inter-village street forms a single string of tourist shops, crammed side-by-side, a spatial concept unique to Kuta.

Over time, the shopping space concept has internationally and historically preferred to do away with the outdoors, viewing nature as an unpredictable obstacle to growing commerce.

Instead, commercialism spawned its own spatial concept in interior realms (the bazaar, the arcade, the atrium) to provide a greater divide from exterior conditions, and shops were designed to provide a greater lure for shoppers. The logic was that, shoppers spending more time indoors meant a greater likelihood of their spending more money, and hence, increased sales.

This also explains the rapid development of air conditioning as a kind of "life support" for shoppers, and escalators as a luxury mechanism for the smooth transportation of shoppers from one level to another, all for the best in the evolution of the shopping concept.

Though it is a nicely done-up public space, one may find Kuta sometimes annoying, what with all the traffic jams and the sudden seasonal influx of tourists to the area. One might also notice the lack of public service facilities, such as benches, public toilets and public pay phones.

The retail shops in Legian are varied in architectural style, with some of modern designs and others aspiring to the traditional Balinese architectural style. Shops span the gamut of local and international branded shops, which stand so close to each other, vying for the limited space, that they form a snaking facade along the equally snaking street.

Of course, at some strategic points, there are larger shopping plazas such as Kuta Center, Kuta Square, Kuta Art Market and Night Market. Whether they are single buildings or a cluster of buildings, they are designed with the concept of "coopetition" in mind. They are naturally placed both to compete and to cooperate, as coined by Charles F. Sabel in 1982 to describe the integral relationship between cooperation and competition in a dynamic economic system. (Work and Politics: The Division of Labor in Industry, Cambridge University Press, 1997.)

Kuta's retail coopetition is interesting, because it was a natural progression of the shopping space concept. The shops are built in close proximity to one another and thus intensify the rivalry among stores in their war for greater profit.

It is sometimes a surreal shopping experience to see several shops in a row selling the same things -- handicraft, Hawaiian shirts, shorts, and bikinis, etc. -- in the same styles, patterns, colors, motifs and designs.

One could take Singapore as a parallel example of this shopping space concept, but it is impossible to compare Jakarta to Kuta, since Jakarta has a very different historical background and development of the shopping space.

Singapore identifies itself as a shopping haven, to the extent that coopetition was announced by the Singaporean Minister of Trade and Industry (1991) as its key economic planning concept. Over the past two decades, this shopping-space-as-coopetition concept has been a central factor in Singapore's urban renewal policies to outlay new developments.

All stores and malls in Singapore were consciously planned to accommodate coopetition. Orchard Road, for example, located in central Singapore, has been transformed over the years into a shopping, hotel, office and entertainment boulevard. The closeness of malls to each other forces mall owners to compete for customers, but they also cooperate with one another to optimize customer access to parking lots and drop-off/pick-up points.

In the cases of both Singapore and Bali, shopping is serious business, and the retail coopetition concept has the potential to create sustainable economic development.

Shopping in Kuta leaves people with many memories of repeat shopping experiences, or of buying the exact same items at different boutiques and outlets. This could well be because Kuta's shopping space is an ecological exchange environment for both the retail industry and its consumer participants.

If we imagine shopping as ecology, the biodiversity of the shop species in Kuta would never become homogeneous nor stagnant. Shops, shoppers and shopping items found in Kuta are as numerous as they are varied. This is not only a matter of principle, but also a matter of survival and economic benefit.

In addition, the Kuta shopping space is unstable, in that it is a transitory space, constantly changing. Kuta shops are not built in one particular architectural style, and simply imply a notion of newness through embracing various styles. Shopping buildings in Kuta don't age; they die young. They are crumbling even as the cashiers tally their intake of the day.

Meanwhile, new shopping buildings in Kuta are developed in a repetitive, recycled fashion, while their varying plumage of shop front decor and familiar logos adds to the diversified images.

Faceless facades with big neon signs flashing brand names are typical of international shops, while next door, unair- conditioned local shops compete with their dynamic facades mosaically created from all the goods they put on display for the day. Perhaps, for the sake of economics, the Balinese courtyard architecture with its clear hierarchical system has slipped into these facades, in a kind of mutated Balinese style.

It is a pity, however, that the previously booming tourism in Bali produced these commercial shopping spaces without any urban planning.

Now, after the Bali bombings, Kuta -- and Bali on the whole -- is indeed in a period of mourning, waiting to get back to business again. Meanwhile, the unique Kuta shopping spaces are a snatch of memory, frozen in time like Sleeping Beauty's castle, awaiting the kiss of life from Prince Tourism.