These shopping plazas just keep getting bigger and bigger, you know. Last week I paid a visit to the new Grand Indonesia, which stretches all the way from Hotel Indonesia (currently under reconstruction) until quite near Tanah Abang.
I felt some initial disorientation upon leaving my taxi, as the construction of this behemoth of a plaza has entailed a complete transformation of the surrounding area's topography.
"Jagung Tinggi!! Where the hell am I?" I thought cryptically as the plaza loomed over me ominously.
I located one of the entrances and headed for the automatic sliding doors. As I entered, two extravagantly coiffed local ladies exited and got into a top-of-the-line BMW. Clearly this plaza was going to be the utmost in discerning luxury: reassuringly expensive and free of vendors selling three pairs of socks for Rp.10,000.
Inside, I was soon lost within the maze of boutiques, escalators, mezzanines and "air bridges". The place was so huge and opulent it seemed like some vast intergalactic space station populated by hyperrich humanoids. A retail simulation of reality blasted out of orbit and freed from the surly terrestrial bonds of affordability, sweat and dirt.
I spiraled upwards through the labyrinth of escalators, heading ever deeper into the heart of the plaza. The upper floors seemed to push further and further into the realms of a weightless virtual reality, a future interior world in which the pleasure principle is the only social imperative and all mankind has left to do is shop and have fun.
The restaurant and food court floor is an absolute fantasy land. It is draped entirely in the mellow browns and rustic hues of ethnic fabrics.I came across a mini funfair on my epic voyage, as well as an indoor beach (yes, really).
Elsewhere, the Grand's upper floors are a postmodern, post-historical mix-and-match of Elizabethan lampstands, Roman fountains and Greek friezes. It all seemed like some hi-tech, hedonic hologram world in which debit cards and doughnuts reign supreme.
I read recently that the city apparently plans to turn Jl. Casablanca into Jakarta's version of Singapore's Orchard Road: a huge shopping complex that will no doubt leave even the Grand in the dust, just as the Grand has left behind that previous behemoth record holder, Senayan City.
And so Jakarta's plaza bubble continues to grow apace, driven by a thirst for instant profits, a dearth of imagination and, these days, a reckless disregard for the impending inflation hikes and consumer credit crunch. Yes, the shopping mall continues to spread its deodorized tentacles throughout every vacant space in the city -- these days usually with some luxury apartments spliced onto the side. Jakartans' highest aspiration is apparently to be able to walk straight out of one's front door and into a plaza without having to first expose oneself to the city's fetid air.
It may be that at some time in the future, all of the city's plazas will join up and be linked by various "air walks" and travelators into one huge indoor society of petty bourgeois shoppers.
The huge metaplaza will link up with apartments, hospitals and schools to create a total life plan for the middle and upper classes, whilst the underclass squats in rags over bonfires outside the its portals, roasting dead rats on sticks, left permanently out in the cold (warm?). A new generation of kids will be born inside the metamall and live there all their lives.
I too began to get an uneasy sense, as I wandered around the enormous Grand, that I'd never find the exit. My whole dystopian omnimall fantasy/nightmare was beginning to remind me of H.G. Wells' The Time Machine. In Wells' seminal science fiction novella, a man invents a time machine and travels into the earth's future. When he gets there, he finds mankind has diverged into two distinct species.
The overclass, called the Eloi, have all their material needs met by an advanced technology which has subjugated nature to its own designs. They live in a hollow utopia, however, as this amazing technology, through the meeting of all of their material needs and demands, has led to their devolution. The Eloi no longer have to strive and struggle for anything, and have thus become incurious and physically weak.
The underclass in this future are called the Morlocks. The Morlocks are cannibal and bestial, resembling human spiders. They live underground and maintain the machinery that keeps the Eloi docile and well-fed. Both species are of subhuman intelligence.
I think old H.G.'s book can be viewed as a political allegory as much as anything else, and perhaps the seeds of this extreme vision are being sewn in Jakarta and in other large cities around the world.
As I wandered around the Grand, gradually feeling myself pacified and mollified by the shiny lights, piped music and glittering consumer durable, I began to feel my inner Eloi struggling to emerge.
Dave... my mind is going. Dave... no hang on, that was something else.
http://metromad.blogspot.com/
--Simon Pitchforth
