Mall country

ILOILO CITY — Malls are rising everywhere in the Philippines. Here in Iloilo alone, Robinsons opened its third mall; Megaworld inaugurated its Festive Walk in Iloilo Business Park, and Vista Land opened Vista Mall Iloilo — all within the past several months. My friends are no longer sure how many malls there really are, but theater critic Vincen Gregory Yu estimates “a minimum of 15.”

The mushrooming of malls is not happening in Iloilo alone. Even in smaller cities and towns, malls are being built in all shapes and sizes: in May this year, SM opened its 70th mall in the country: SM City Telabastagan in Pampanga. As if Metro Manila weren’t already saturated with malls, it is seeing more of them, with Ayala recently unveiling its 24th: Circuit Makati.

The facile answer to the appeal of malls is that they’re convenient and comfortable: One can work, work out, eat, drink, renew one’s driver’s license, hear Mass, and even just hang out (yes, “tambay”) in a mall. In a way, malls are for Filipinos today what the town center was in the past: There’s everything and everyone. It is no coincidence that some of the malls are actually named “town centers.”

But why do we perceive malls “convenient” and “comfortable” in the first place? To answer this question, we must look at our specific sociocultural, economic and even infrastructural circumstances.

To begin with, malls are convenient because the rest of the city has become “inconvenient.” With the ever-worsening traffic and ever-inconvenient transport, moving from one place to another, let alone finding parking, has simply become impossible. It is far more efficient to do several things in one place.

Similarly, malls are comfortable because our cities have become “uncomfortable.” Most of our cities have no public spaces where people can hang out. For Filipinos, malls provide protection from rains and floods, along with security and air-conditioning: a necessity for a few, and a genuine pleasure for the many who have to regularly contend with the heat, humidity and pollution.

Malls also convey a sense of belonging to the metropole and to “modernity” itself, and this has particular resonance in the provinces. It is no accident that celebrities regularly go on mall tours, which, alongside fashion shows and the latest movies, reinforce the notion of malls as portals that link consumers with their hoped-for, imagined lifestyles.

Despite, however, the compatibility of malls with our everyday needs and wants, they also have socioeconomic implications that we have to look at critically.

For one, they signify a further concentration of land and wealth in the hands of the few. Mall developers today are essentially what landlords have been throughout our history: making so much profit from sales and rentals, while most of those under their employ are given minimum wage.

Malls also easily outcompete small retailers, making their impact on the local economy at best uneven. Moreover, by showcasing and glorifying a consumption-based lifestyle, they not only reflect, but also reinforce, social inequality.

In a way, malls help create the conditions that cause people to turn to them. People go to malls because of the traffic, but malls themselves cause traffic. People hang out in malls because there are no public parks, but malls themselves occupy lands that should have been spaces for parks.

To their credit, mall developers engage in various social initiatives, but they can do much more. Instead of causing traffic, malls can facilitate mobility by opening up additional road lanes and spearheading walkability in their communities. Also, with their big profits, can malls not regularize (more of) their workers, and give them more benefits?

Beyond mall developers and the local officials who eagerly accommodate them, however, we should also extend our criticality to ourselves. As consumers, we can choose to support local enterprises, and, as citizens, we can (and should) demand that our public spaces be protected, transportation be improved and cities be made more livable.

Others may see Iloilo’s malls as a sign of progress. But what we should really be counting and hailing are its esplanades.

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