In Prague, there is Avion and Centrum Cerny Most. Bucharest has Baneasa and Liberty. In Budapest, we have Allee and WestEnd. These aren’t the names of football stadiums. They are the new generation of huge shopping malls in eastern Europe – a booming testament to the growth of consumerism in Europe’s hinterland and a cultural pointer to the true values underpinning modern society.
While these shopping malls are places to shop and, increasingly, to eat and drink, in these emerging capitalist economies they are also a reflection of the nature of capital – of the need to invest and speculate. For many, they provide service sector jobs, and a family-friendly destination on dark afternoons in winter. For a few, they serve as an opportunity to wash dirty money – whether as investors or as retailers of luxury brands that few can actually afford.
However, the biggest significance of the growth in shopping malls may be in the illumination of the balance between the public and private sectors. Shopping malls are most often built on brown-field sites, close to the heart of a city centre, on property owned by national or local government. The scale is impressive. WestEnd Centre in Budapest, the biggest European mall at the time of construction in 1999, contains around 400 shops. Arena Plaza has more than 200 shops and parking space for 2,800 cars at any one time.
Sadly, the process of building a shopping mall and its associated parking facilities is frequently associated with corruption. Leveque Munkacsoport, a Hungarian NGO, has been campaigning on this recently in Dunakeszi, Hungary. In this particular instance, a falsified government environmental report came close to approving the building of a car park on a patch of rare marshland.
Malls represent a privatisation of space. More importantly, this is usually a privatisation without public representation. The added pollution and infrastructure demands of a shopping mall, its consumption of electricity and resources, all represent costs, and environmental damage that are left to the public to bear.
Shopping malls are a classic example of a type of unacknowledged public-private partnership – one in which the public interest is barely represented by the end result. There are many shopping malls with cinemas, bowling alleys, indoor ice rinks and even hotels. How many have honoured obligations to provide reading rooms, internet libraries, social enterprise workshop facilities or host community health and social services?
Europe’s ageing population actually represents an employment opportunity for care services and for businesses to expand the possibilities for older people to join a new “grey economy”. However, there is only slight representation of public interest in the giant building projects of our time.
Private projects ignore public interest, while private interests make their voices heard loudly.
Look at Barack Obama’s plans for federal reform. Public projects such as his $50 billion infrastructure plan are obliged to feature huge opportunities for banks, consultants and real estate speculators to get rich on the back of public investment. The majority of private projects, such as retail parks, rarely contain a reference to the community interest.
President Obama’s plan contains echoes of Labour’s costly public-private partnership debacle on the London Underground. Obama’s transportation proposals are likely to result in toll roads and booths, as private investors demand quick returns. It’s a plan that also hints at the various public-private partnership building projects, driven by the last Labour Government, which have resulted in the British state being tied into expensive leaseholds for many of the services it provides. “PPP government” also means that facility management is increasingly handled by private firms such as Serco, Capita or Enterprise. After all, toll-roads need a system to monitor and sell tickets.
Socialists and social democrats across Europe have yet to respond fully to the role that private interests now play in determining urban and civic realities.
Shopping malls are signifiers, not only of consumerism, but also of the shifting core of financially-driven capitalism, which is eroding democratic and civic culture across the European Union and the United States. It is distorting all conception of the public interest in favour of PPP government.
And holders of public office tend to be pushovers for private finance. There is no public interest perceived to be separate to that of private interests. The bigger the mall, the more widespread the rot.
Carl Rowlands is a member of the steering committee of Labour International’s Central European branch
