Consumerism continues to annex
modern life
The
amount of time that I find myself spending in the city’s retail palaces has
tailed off enormously in recent years, as I'm of the opinion that, in the words
of the old joke, once you've seen one shopping plaza, you've seen a mall. New
shopping plazas continue to mushroom all over Jakarta however and most recently
I was passing the enormous new Kota Kasablanka mall and popped in, lured by the
promise of a branch of Ace Hardware. Yet another mall to burn time in. The
interior was absolutely huge, more like an air terminal than a shopping mall.
Most unsettlingly though, I stumbled across a branch of Top Man/Top Shop, and as
a Brit I find it slightly disconcerting to see shops such as these and
Debenhams, rather proletarian UK stores to be frank, being scrubbed up and
repackaged for the Indonesian petty bourgeoisie.
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Hanging
out at shopping malls is a favourite activity in Jakarta, although this seems
like something of a self-fulfilling prophecy to me. If there's nothing but
malls in the city then, unsurprisingly, people will go to malls. In this
respect, Indonesia once again exemplifies all of the worst elements of late
capitalism, its capital city being woefully bereft of parks, libraries,
theatres or public sports facilities and instead being crammed with temples of
vapid materialism, circuses and bread for the iPhone generation that denote
something of a land-use imbalance in town. Bright, shining sterile fantasy
worlds unencumbered by the diesel fumes, guys with guitars, potholes and
dried-on-chilli-sauce stains that prevail outside. An odourless nirvana of
boutiques, food courts, computer motherboards and security guards in ill-fitting
uniforms ready to pounce if they see a single bead of perspiration breaking out
on your forehead.
Yes,
Jakartans love their shopping malls and those escalators and food courts have
seemingly won the battle for the twenty-first century Indonesian soul. Behind
all of the Grand Guignol, 120dB fun fashion shows in the plaza lobbies though, the
city’s malls are clearly papering over the cracks of a serious infrastructure
deficit.
A
thousand years hence perhaps, future archaeologist and anthropologists will unearth
Jakarta's great plazas along with petrified Starbucks beakers and mobile-phone
casings and pontificate on what strange religion their ancestors practised in
these places. And indeed, more than just temples of consumption, malls such as
Cilandak Town Square promote a new kind of lifestyle hedonism completely
divorced from the utilitarian weekly supermarket shop. Just hanging out in
these places is where it’s at.
The
result of this new plaza-centric social paradigm also seems to be affecting the
general population’s holiday time. Modern life negatively impacting people's
explorations of the countryside around them can be seen in a number of
developed countries as well. This is particularly distressing, given that the
potentially species threatening problems that humanity faces over the next half
century or so are rooted primarily in the natural systems that support us. Any
increasing alienation from these systems, specifically people spending their
existences trudging around shopping plazas or sitting isolated in their bedrooms
behind computer terminals, is not really going to catalyse any quest for
solutions.
In
this context, plaza life seems to impact Jakartans awareness of the beautiful
West Java countryside that lies outside their stinking city, and it achieves
this in two main ways. Firstly, the number of people heading out of town to
relatively local beaches such as Carita and Pelabuhan Ratu is pretty small
these days. Now admittedly the road to Pelabuhan Ratu can get a little jammed,
however Carita is relatively straightforward to reach, with a good two thirds
of the journey lying along a speedy toll road. During a recent trip to Carita I
came across a number of pretty rundown hotels, including one fantastic
abandoned effort which was presumably quite extravagant in its day.
It
seems that the number of Jakartans heading out of town in order to explore
their local landscapes has tailed off over the last decade, as people spend an
increasing amount of time in those retail pleasure palaces, tapping away on
their laptops. Admittedly, the advent of cheap flights to Bali is also no doubt
playing a part in this phenomenon; however the average Bali holiday
increasingly seems to feature plenty of, yes you guessed it, shopping, in familiar
urbanised environments recreated in a non-urban setting.
And
this brings us on to the second phenomenon impacting local city slickers’
awareness of the countryside, namely resorts and hotels increasingly resembling
the classic plaza environment. I recently had the pleasure of staying in one of
the huge holiday-villa complexes up in Puncak. It was called Kota Bunga (Flower
City) and upon arriving I took a stroll in order to familiarise myself with the
Flower City experience first hand, in all of its prefabricated, garish
hideousness.
The
complex covered a huge area and was arranged into neat suburban cul-de-sacs
that seemingly contained the exact replicas of the Jakarta pied-à-terres lived
in by the families who come to stay here. The main difference were the vibrant
hues of the houses' exteriors and the postmodern mishmash of cutesy
architectural designs that proliferated like a Walt Disney acid trip. The
families themselves seemed to contain two Nintendo-brained children cramming
ice cream and noodles into their wide-bore gullets, and all were born by the
regulation people carrier, or perhaps a big Mercedes for the richer clans.
Insulting
stereotypes aside however, it was clear that any local expression of West
Javanese culture had been tastefully airbrushed out of this theme park in
search of the theme. Admittedly there was an area in the complex called Kampung
Budaya (Cultural Village), although its cultural reach didn't seem to extend
beyond an overpriced branch of KFC and a swimming pool full urinating kids.
There was also a postmodern apocalypse of ersatz Greek friezes, old English
lamp standards and mock European architecture, all clashing in the same
tasteless hyperreal style of your local shopping mall, all elements stripped of
their original meanings and transplanted into the toy-town fantasy. Pride of
place went to a scale mockup of Mount Rushmore that loomed perplexingly 30m
high over the complex lake. The chiselled faces of the four US presidents
surveyed the scene before them sternly as if about to pass judgement.
Well,
not my scene really, and those Jakarta malls should be housing way more hiking-boot
shops in my opinion. I need a holiday.
