Nineteenth International Conference on Interdisciplinary Social Sciences

Abstract

My paper explores how shopping malls are examples of climate urbanism; urban spaces being controlled by military and security techniques, and how these protected spaces become destination of upper class in Jakarta, Indonesia. Migration, in a sense, is the oldest human way of dealing with unfavorable living condition, and shopping malls reshape the migratory patterns into daily refuge seeking from the urban chaos. I argue that shopping malls create a fantasy city that isolates its visitors from the outside reality, especially from the environmental and social impacts of climate change. Shopping malls remove any dark space or backstage, where the costs and consequences of their existence are observable. They are utopian, pleasure spaces that produce standardized and hygienic bodies, which are sucked inside, while leaving the outside as a depleted wasteland. I use autobiographical ethnography to provide an analysis of shopping spaces seen as alternative universes for privileged forms of human life, that are protected by neoliberal narrative. As such, they utilize deteriorating quality of the city and its climate-induced harsh conditions to seduce the richer segment of the urban population. They enable the daily migration into these spaces instead of permanent migration somewhere else. I argue that shopping malls reflect the individualization, anxiety, and fragmentation of humans, and that they are a temporary bandage that gains popularity as the urban solution to a climate change.