In Defence of the Regional Mall, Against Everyone Who Thinks It Should Have Died Already

Every six months, like a seasonal allergy, a fresh column appears in some regional or international publication declaring that the Gulf mall has finally entered its terminal phase. The columnist cites the rise of online shopping, the maturation of high street retail in the newer urban districts, the supposed cultural shift away from the air-conditioned interior toward a rediscovered outdoor public realm. The columnist publishes the piece, accepts the modest engagement metrics, and moves on. The mall, undeclared and unimpressed, continues, week after week, to be the only functional public living room that a meaningful share of the regional population has access to. The columns continue to be wrong.

What the mall actually is, beyond the shops

It is the only large covered public space in the region that is genuinely free to enter, climatically comfortable for the seven months of the year when the outdoor temperature ranges from inadvisable to actively dangerous, and large enough to absorb teenagers, grandparents, after-school study groups, first dates, job interviews, friend meet-ups, fitness walking groups in the early mornings, and the occasional bewildered tourist, all without requiring any single user to consume in order to remain. The retail is the financing mechanism. The civic function is the product. The columnists who keep writing the obituary persistently confuse the two.

The civic function is real and is measurable. Walk through any of the better-managed regional malls on a Friday afternoon and count the proportion of people sitting on benches and at cafe tables who have not yet visited a shop and are not particularly planning to. The proportion is meaningful. Those people are using the space the way a different culture would use a town square. The regional climate does not permit a town square that is usable seven months of the year. The mall is the climate-adjusted version of the town square, and the column that does not understand this is writing about a building it has not actually spent enough time in.

Why the criticisms miss the actual mall

The criticisms are usually written from the perspective of a particular kind of urban professional whose own life does not require the mall and who therefore reasons, by introspection, that the mall is no longer required by anyone. The professional has a car, lives in a neighbourhood with adequate climate-controlled cafes, has access to a private gym, and can afford to socialise in restaurants whose minimum spend would exclude a meaningful share of the population. The professional projects this lifestyle onto the population at large and concludes, on the basis of the projection, that the mall must be in decline. The conclusion is wrong because the projection is wrong. The mall is serving a population the professional, in the prevailing analysis, has stopped seeing.

The population includes the family on a single mid-range income that cannot afford the kind of weekend out the columnist treats as the baseline assumption. It includes the elderly relative who needs a long walk in a flat air-conditioned environment for medical reasons. It includes the teenagers who, in the absence of the mall, would simply have no public space at all and would, in operational terms, be confined to bedrooms in apartments that were not designed for prolonged adolescent occupancy. The mall serves these populations cheaply and reliably and at scale, and the alternative the columnists implicitly propose is one that, on inspection, does not actually serve them at all.

What a more honest accounting of the mall would acknowledge

It would acknowledge that the mall is one of the more functional civic institutions the region has produced, and that the absence of more such institutions, rather than the presence of the mall, is the problem worth writing about. It would acknowledge that the operators of the better malls have, over the past several years, done more to design for the non-retail uses of the space than the urbanist critics have noticed. It would acknowledge that the regional retail market is mature enough that the malls that have survived the past decade have done so by becoming better at the civic function rather than by becoming worse at the retail one.

The mall is, by all means, due for a critical conversation about what it could become with another decade of thoughtful operator attention. The conversation that has been published, again and again, is not that conversation. The conversation that has been published is a confident dismissal of an institution that has, on the merits, outperformed the alternatives the dismissers have implicitly proposed. The mall will outlast the column. It probably should.