Mall developers urged to be more neighborly

The Jakarta Post ,  Jakarta   |  Wed, 12/06/2006 1:15 PM  |  Jakarta

Anissa S. Febrina, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Easy access from one shopping center to another seems to have become passe, in fact the reverse is happening: the city's main retail streets have been broken into isolated islands of malls.

The some 60 shopping centers in the city may have been built in clusters, but walking between them can be difficult -- dangerous even.

""Clusters of malls in Jakarta have been made without any particular urbanistic idea behind them, and yet they are a kind of urban structure within the city, which is of great significance,"" said Alex Wall, an urban planning professor at Karlsruhe University in Germany.

Wall, the author of From Urban Shop to New City, is currently working with Tarumanegara University, Jakarta, to research retail development in the city.

""It (clustering) presents an opportunity for these sometimes heterogeneous and not connected clusters to re-urbanize and become a shopping district within themselves and, hopefully, to begin to connect to the urban fabric surrounding them.

""Clustering is a basis for making a legible identity for Jakarta,"" he said.

But it seems that mall developers are not yet ready to let go of their egos.

The developers of shopping centers in identifiable clusters, like those in Senayan, South Jakarta; on Jl. Thamrin, Central Jakarta, or in Glodok, West Jakarta, have all made the same mistake:

People have to drive in and out of parking lots to be able to move from one mall to the next, a case that mall inventor Victor Gruen called ""forced mobility"".

Developer Summarecon plans to transform the previously inward-oriented malls into more inclusive ones by building pedestrian walkways to connect the existing buildings.

Indonesian Mall Operators Association head M. Sochirin said it was up to developers whether they wanted to be linked to one another as there were no regulations on the issue.

It is actually within these created linkages that vendors could be accommodated. Currently, the city administration ""forces"" malls to allocate 20 percent of their space for small and medium enterprises.

A regulation that sounds good on paper but is still a far cry from successfully integrating big and small businesses.

As main retail streets lose pedestrian traffic to enclosed shopping centers, small-scale vendors are also finding themselves isolated.

Simply opening mall gates would give them back their market.

Aside from creating better cooperation between mall operators, closer ties with the tourist and hospitality industries could further support the development of malls.

""Developers can tap in to the market of domestic tourists from neighboring cities by creating specifically targeted shopping tours,"" Tarumanagara University's urban planner Jo Santoso said.

Shuttle buses could take tour groups to a certain point and from there different types of shoppers could head to their places of interest, he said.

Meanwhile, on the issue of the social inequality that has come out of today's era of mushrooming malls, the researchers suggested there should be new inner-city housing units built to balance the conversion of residential areas into commercial ones.

A certain percentage of the units should be dedicated for the middle-lower income groups, which serve as the engine of the malls by working as shop attendants, waiters or security guards.

All in all, the key word in maximizing the potential of malls is accessibility.

Not only for those in fancy cars, or those with international-chain shops. For all.

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