Figure 4 (above): The top view of Southdale Center in 2009 (Source:
Google Maps)
Figure 5 (left): The aerial view of Northland Center
Figure 6 (right): The plan of Northland Center in 1954
(Source: Seline Borking, The Fascinating History of Shopping Malls (Den Haag: MAB Groep B.V., 1998), p. 40 and 39 respectively. Originally in Victor Gruen, Centers for the Urban Environment: Survival of the Cities (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1973), p. 30 and 28 respectively.)
Shopping mall, or shopping centre,
is a collection of retail units concentrated in a highly controlled interior
environment under one management. In some literature, shopping mall is
considered very similar to a department store.
But they differ from each other in scale, circulation and spatial layout in
Hong Kong [Figure 7]. The shopping malls in Hong Kong are much bigger in size
than the department stores, that the stores and supermarkets are usually the
anchor stores of the malls nowadays. The shops in a mall have their own shop
front and entrance for the circulation, while those in the department store can
be approached in all directions from the walking paths. Spatially, the shops in
a mall have very clear demarcation of their borders, and they could have
different opening hours as long as the mall is open, unlike those in the
department stores. The shops in a mall also have more freedom to design their
own interiors and in the choices of their commodities, which are both commonly
standardized in many department stores.
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Figure 7: The interior views of the New Town Plaza (新城市廣場) in Sha Tin (沙田) in August 2010
1.3 A Brief History of the Department
Stores and Shopping Malls in Hong Kong
The first department store of Hong Kong, the
Sincere Company (先施公司),
dates back to 1900, the time when Hong Kong was the British colony.
After the opening of the other three big department stores, which were
collectively called ‘The Big Four Companies (四大公司)’, namely the Wing On Company (永安公司),
the Dah Sun Company (大新公司) and the Chung Hwa Department Store (中華百貨公司) in
the year 1907, 1911 and 1932 respectively, the
Hong Kong retail industry was formed, amidst
the severe worldwide economic depression in the 1930s and the Hong Kong financial
market crisis in 1935.
In 1938, the first department store selling
national products (Chinese made products), the China Products Co. (中國國貨公司),
was founded in Hong Kong. This
kind of department store is called the national products department store (國貨公司). In
the 1940s, more and more small and middle department stores were opened by
Chinese entrepreneurs, with the interruption of the Japanese Occupation of Hong
Kong (香港日治時期) during World War II. After the ‘liberation’
of the mainland China in 1949 by the Communist Party of China, and the
elimination of capitalism and ‘capitalist-roaders’, the China Products Co. was
transformed into a state-run socialist institution of the new China.
Some companies targeting the mainland market were either sapped, for example the
Dah Sun Company, or closed, like the Chung Hwa Department Store.
In the early 1950s, embargoes were imposed by the United States and some other
capitalist countries on China, Hong Kong and Macau during the Korean War,
causing devastating consequence in the economy and society of Hong Kong. Since
some daily necessities were listed prohibited items, there was a serious slump
in the Hong Kong retailing industry. In
the late 1950s, the national products department stores
started to boom, with the opening of the most well-known one Yue Hwa Chinese Products Emporium
Limited (裕華國產百貨有限公司) in 1959. The development reached its
climax in the 1960s which was recognized as the ‘Golden Age of the National
Products’.
In the 1960s, the first Japanese department
store in Hong Kong, The
Daimaru, Inc. (株式會社大丸), and the first
shopping mall in the city, Ocean Terminal (海運大廈), were opened (in November 1960 and on 22 March 1966 respectively). Ocean
Terminal was the first shopping mall in Asia, prior to the pioneers of the shopping
malls in Japan – Izumiya Co., Ltd. (株式會社泉屋) and the Daiei, Inc. (株式會社大榮). Daimaru
was the only Japanese department store in Hong Kong until
the second one, Isetan
Co., Ltd. (株式會社伊勢丹), and the third one, Matsuzakaya Co., Ltd. (株式會社松坂屋), arrived in
September 1973 and April 1974 respectively.
In the 1970s, the national products department
stores began to decline, despite the soaring economy of Hong Kong, partly
because of the competitive market and their poor management.
Yet, their business survived until the 1980s due to a significant swift in the
policy of the People’s Republic of China implemented in December 1978 – The
Chinese Economy Reform or ‘Reform and Opening’ (改革開放) which ‘opened China up to the
outside world’. A lot of people in Hong Kong then went back to mainland China
to visit their family members or relatives, usually with gifts or souvenirs
purchased in the national products department stores in Hong Kong.
This trend kept the businesses of the national products department stores
running as the old days, but it lasted for only a few years until around 1983.
1980s was a disastrous decade for the national
products department stores in Hong Kong, and at the same time the most fast-growing decade for the Japanese ones. The number of the national products
department stores plummeted from 84 (with 184 main and branch stores) in 1984
to 48 (with 66 main and branch stores) in 1987,
while twelve more Japanese department stores were opened in the urban centre
(Hong Kong Island and Kowloon) and the new towns (or satellite cities).
It was also the decade when shopping malls started to emerge in different parts
of the city: The Landmark (置地廣場) (1980) in Central (the financial
centre), Cityplaza (太古城中心) (1982) in Taikoo Shing (a new town on the
Hong Kong Island), New Town Plaza (新城市廣場) (1984) in Shatin (a new town in the New Territories) and Pacific Place
(太古廣場) (1989) in Admiralty (a business district with offices, hotels,
government buildings and the High Court).
In the 1990s, fewer department stores were
opened while shopping malls mushroomed in all parts of Hong Kong. The most
popular malls built in this period included the Times Square (時代廣場) in Causeway Bay (1994), Grand
Century Place (新世紀廣場) in
Mong Kok (1997) and Festival Walk (又一城) in Kowloon Tong (1998).
Hardly hit by the 1997 Asian Financial
Crisis happened soon after the handover of sovereignty over Hong Kong from the
United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China on 1 July 1997, many parent
companies of the Japanese department stores suffered a colossal loss, and had
to close down their businesses in Hong Kong. Among these stores were Yaohan (八百伴), Matsuzakaya (松坂屋) and Daimaru (大丸) which
closed in 1997, August and December of 1998 respectively.
The crisis also caused a deep impact on the local and national products department
stores.
After the year 2000,
not many department stores were left. They either moved to the periphery of the
city for lower rent or moved into the shopping malls and became the anchor
stores.
Unlike the department stores, the shopping malls continued to flourish.
In 2003, Hong Kong’s
recovering economy went to another low point, due to the outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS)(沙士). The tourism and retailing
industry suffered severely. On 29 June 2003, the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic
Partnership Arrangement (CEPA)(內地與香港關於建立更緊密經貿關係的安排) was signed. After a month, on 28 July 2003, the Individual
Visit Scheme (港澳個人遊計劃) was
launched by the central government of China to boost the economy of Hong Kong
and Macau.
The two measures brought immediate benefits to the stagnant economy of Hong
Kong, especially for the tourism and retailing industry. A lot of Mainland travelers,
with great purchasing power, visit Hong Kong during their holidays thereafter. Nevertheless,
old department stores did not benefit from the policies as much as shopping
malls did, and they continued to close down. For example two branches of one of
the oldest department stores in Hong Kong - Wing On (永安百貨) were closed in February 2004, the
last department store of Chinese Resources (華潤百貨), a
state-owned enterprise, was closed on 8 April 2005, and four branches of the
big Japanese department store JUSCO (吉之島/佳世客) were closed from 2004 to 2010. In the meantime, shopping malls continue
to grow and expand, with almost one new mall being built per year: IFC Mall
(2003) in Central, Langham Place (朗豪坊) (2004) in Mong Kok, APM (2005)
in Kwun Tong, MegaBox (2007) in Kowloon Bay, and Elements (圓方) (2007), K11 (2009) and iSQUARE (國際廣場) (2009) in Tsim
Sha Tsui.
2
Consumer Culture
and Consumption Sites
in Hong Kong
2.1
A Journey to the Department Stores
Going to department stores was a serious
journey in the past. People would reserve a day, bring a larger sum of money for
something more precious and expensive than they usually found in a grocery
store, dress up properly and go with family, relatives or friends.
It is a not a casual or daily event before the 1970s. Since department stores
were only opened in the commercial districts in the urban centre before the
1980s, people living in other parts of the city had to spend a lot of time in
travelling to the stores. People had very clear ideas about what kind of
products should be purchased in which stores beforehand, for example they would
buy UK-made woolen sweater in Wing On, Italy-made glasses for drinks in Sincere, and big
commodities in Dah Dah Department Store (大大百貨公司).
Department Stores were the places where Hong
Kong people first contacted the modern style of retailing and consumption customs.
The stores established a reliable retailing and consumption system in which the
customer rights are protected. For instance, the fixed price merchandise
practice was established first by Sincere in 1900,
and the credit, return and payment policies were established throughout the
development of the department stores in later times. The retailing and
consuming system were developed gradually for decades, based on western models
as well as traditional Chinese business practices and cultural values. Department
stores were the cradle of the contemporary consumer culture.
In the 1980s, going to department stores
become a leisure trip, highly influenced by the Japanese department stores prevailing
in Hong Kong in this decade. It was the time when shopping became an experience
rather than a journey for buying necessities. The Japanese brought to Hong Kong
a new culture of consumption, with unprecedented enterprise culture, marketing
strategies and shopping experience. Shopping in department stores started to
become part of the social life of the Hong Kong people. In some newly developed
satellite towns, the stores were almost the ‘community centres’ and ‘leisure
centres’ to the residents. For
example, a lot of residents living in Tuen Mun (屯門), a new town in the New Territories, were at a loss and could not find
a new place for meeting and gathering, especially the elderly and the
housewives, after the closure of Yaohan in Hong Kong in 1997. A
professor of Japanese Studies in The University of Hong Kong (HKU) pointed out
that the Yaohan echoed some characteristics of the traditional Chinese market,
which made it different from other department stores. Firstly, it provided a
lot of benches which created the places for encounter. Secondly, inside the
department stores there were a lot of temporary stores in which the
salespersons or products promoters would yell for attention, which was a
typical scene in a traditional Chinese market. Lastly, there were a lot of products
and cooking demonstrations which attracted a lot of onlookers, which were like
street performances.
The department stores in the satellite cities substituted the malfunctioning
public space planned by the government, though driven by economic incentive.
The change in the attitude and purpose of
visiting department stores is one of the reasons why the national products
department stores diminished in the 80s. If the Japanese department stores
represented shopping for leisure, the national products ones represented to
purchase out of necessities: buying goods to meet basic needs as well as for
cultural and psychological gratification. Before the early 1970s, shopping and
consumption, beyond the purchase of daily necessities, were associated with a
lifestyle beyond the reach of ordinary people.
2.2
The Genesis and Transformation of
the Shopping Malls
The first shopping mall of Hong Kong, Ocean Terminal (海運大廈), built on a huge pier in Tsim Sha Tsui (尖沙咀), was opened on 22 March 1966. It
was built to satisfy primarily the shopping desires of the affluent foreigners
coming from abroad, rather than the locals. This
intention can be seen in the original tenant mixture of the mall – camera,
jewellery and luxury-goods shops. Nevertheless,
the mall was perceived as more than just another venue of high consumption. For
the locals, it was a place for having a taste of modern and Western ways of life.
Its modern atmosphere was found liberating.
Tai-lok Lui, a well-known sociologist of Hong Kong, saw the construction of the
mall the origin of the ‘malling’ process in Hong Kong. The subsequent
localization of the shopping mall culture was an outcome of growing affluence
among the local people and the development of a local consumption culture since
the 1970s.
The ‘malling’ process continued with the
addition of The Landmark, Cityplaza and The New Town Plaza in the 1980s. Together
with the arrival and prevail of the Japanese department stores at that time,
these consumption sites contributed to Hong Kong’s transition towards a
consumer society. People
shopped for leisure, and began to construct their own identity by consumption.
In the 1990s, the maturing consumer culture
was switching from leisure consumption to lifestyle consumption. Commodities
were purchased in pursuit of one’s own identity in the society and to express
oneself in front of the others by acquiring different products. Don Slater says
in his book ‘Consumer Culture and Modernity’ that ‘consumer culture is the
privileged medium for negotiating identity and status within a post-traditional
society.’
In the modern world, people rely a lot on appearances – ‘the images we construct
on the surfaces of our bodies, our living spaces, our manners and our voices’ -
which become ‘a crucial way of knowing and identifying ourselves and each
other.’ Since goods can signify social identity and consumer culture is
essentially about the negotiation of status and identity, consumer goods become
very important to the way in which we make up our social appearances, our
social networks and our structures of social value.
Shopping malls started to included
entertainment facilities and services, as a response to the leisure consumption
formed in the previous decade, and tried to attract more visitors by holding various
activities inside the malls, an early form of proposing certain lifestyles. The
Dragon Centre (西九龍中心) opened in
Sham Shui Po in 1994 and the Festival Walk opened in Kowloon Tong in 1998 were
good examples. Dragon Centre targeted at the youngsters in Hong Kong as well as
the local inhabitants of the old Sham Shui Po district with a lot of middle and
low income people. The construction of the first indoor roller coaster in Hong
Kong, which was hung from the roof on the ninth floor, and the skating rink
were feature to attract adolescents, while the selection of shops covering a
rich provision of daily necessities with low prices appealed to the local inhabitants
of the neighbourhood. The mall provided both shopping experience and
necessities products. In recent years, the mall adjusted its positioning and
carried out some reforms which made it different from the past. The Festival
Walk also has a skating rink and even cinemas, but, on the contrary, it
positions itself for middle and higher class consumers. The shops in the mall
are more exclusive and sell more expensive products, which are more about
having a certain kind of lifestyle rather than just fulfilling basic needs in
life.
After the 2000s, the consumer culture has
been heading towards the culture consumption. Due to the increasing affluence
of the society and the rising of the education level, more people try to
establish their social appearance, way of living and identity with culture. In
postmodern society, the value of goods depends more on their cultural value (‘sign-value’)
than on their functional or economic one, and more commodities take the form of
signs and representations instead of material goods.
At the same time, some shopping malls started to promote themselves and
reinforce their positions in the retailing market by branding. It included
promoting the names or brands of their malls in mass media and associating
certain lifestyle and social status with the malls by advertising and marketing.
Besides doing so, some malls built after the year 2000 would try to catch the
attention of the society and their target groups by having iconic forms,
facades, interior spaces or decorations in their design. The shopping malls
started to have ‘concepts’. For example, Langham Place opened in 2004 has a
huge atrium in which there are long escalators called ‘Xpresscalators’
transferring visitors from the 4th floor to the 8th and
then to the 12th floor. On the 13th floor, there is an
architectural feature on the ceiling called ‘Digital Sky’ on which computerized
images are projected. The MegaBox opened in 2007 is a huge ‘box’ which has a
very eye-catching circular atrium that can be seen from the outside of the
mall. The Elements opened in the same year is divided into 5 zones – Metal,
Wood, Water, Fire and Earth – with the concept of the five elements of Nature
in traditional Chinese culture. Each zone has a distinctive interior design and
a collection of art works which respond to the element that the zone belongs
to. For instance, the Wood Zone uses a lot of wooden finishes for the interior
design and has a series of art works which are made of tree branches.
We can see from the above examples that the shopping
malls in the last decade have been increasingly associating themselves with ‘culture’,
probably due to the change in the consumer culture towards culture consumption.
This trend of shopping malls employing cultural elements to establish their
positioning or branding has been confirmed by the completion of K11, which
claims to be the first art mall in the world, in 2009.
2.3
Change of Consumer Culture
leading to the Decline of the Department Stores
The sites of consumption are
closely related to the consumer culture. We have just seen how the shopping
malls have been adapting to the changes in the consumer culture in the last few
decades. Not able to notice and adjust themselves according to these changes could
lead to failures in businesses, and these could be one of the reasons why the
department stores in Hong Kong have been declining. The local and national
department stores had a prime time before the mode of consumption was shifted
from shopping for necessities to shopping for leisure. When the Japanese
department stores brought the mode of leisure consumption to the city in the
80s, the general public turned to these stores which fulfilled both their basic
and spiritual needs. The Japanese stores provided a new choice and helped
transform the consumer culture which echoed the social and economic development
of Hong Kong at that time. The national department stores were not able to
adjust quickly to cater to this new consumer culture, partly due to the
restrictions of being state-owned enterprises, and thus lost the glamour to the
people. The local department stores performed better in reforming their
businesses accordingly, but still had a hard time because of their company
structures and ways of doing business. Their situation deteriorated when later
the leisure consumption was changed to the lifestyle consumption in the 90s.
Due to the limited space and the practice of standardizing in the management,
the department stores in Hong Kong were having difficulty in providing a
multi-cultural shopping environment and a rich selection of products, which
were crucial in the lifestyle consumption, when compared to the shopping malls.
The shopping malls hence played a more prominent role in the retailing industry
in the 1990s. Only certain national and local department stores survived in
this decade, while the Japanese ones were still making profits and expanding
their businesses. The epoch of Japanese department stores was put to an end by the
1997 Asian Financial Crisis in which a lot of companies went bankrupt and were
closed. We do not know whether these successful retailing models of department
stores could lead a good business under the cultural consumption. Now, most of
the department stores become parts of the shopping malls instead of running businesses
in their own building, probably due to the high land price and rent. Although
still keeping their own management and way of running business, their spaces
are limited and the rents are controlled by the malls, which could inhibit
their growth and development.
2.4
Chapter Summary
We have seen how two prominent
business models in the retailing industry – the department store and shopping
mall – have been influenced by the consumer culture. The changes in the consumer
culture are parts of the reasons why the department stores declined and
diminished while the shopping malls rose and replaced their status. The
department stores were generally good at selling products fulfilling daily
necessities. That is why they were the most sought-after places for shopping
before the society became affluent. The arrival of the Japanese department
stores with leisure consumption in the 1980s had a huge impact to the society.
They changed the retailing industry as well as the social activities of the
people. The 80s was also the time when the shopping malls became the daily
sites of consumption due to the development of the new towns. The malls were
built for the uprising of a new group of consumers – the middle class of Hong
Kong. Later when the lifestyle consumption prevailed in the 1990s, the shopping
malls became more important consumption sites for the people, though the
Japanese department stores were still having their heydays. The focus of
consumption began to transfer from commodities to values, and the shopping malls
started to create their own images and brand. In this decade, it was obvious that
the department stores were about commodities while the shopping malls were
about values like lifestyle and identity – the advertisements of the department
stores were selling their commodities while those of the shopping malls were
marketing about the lifestyle and social status they represented. For the age
of the culture consumption, we cannot compare the two business models because
the successful retailing model of the department store, the Japanese one, had
been ruled out from the market due to other economic factors.
3
Department
Stores, Shopping Malls
and Urban
Development
Figure 8: The typical
shopping malls in Hong Kong and the United States
3.1
Chapter Overview
The urban development of Hong
Kong has a significant influence on constituting the uprising and downturn of the
shopping malls and the department stores. In this chapter, we are going to look
into two crucial factors involved in this development: the new towns (新市鎮) (or
satellite cities) and the infrastructure. Each paragraph in the following
overview will be discussed in detail per section
Department stores were mostly
located in the commercial districts in the urban centre, before the local
department store Wing On opened its branch store in the first private housing
estate of Hong Kong (Mei Foo Sun Chuen) in the 1970s, and the Japanese
department store Yaohan opened its first store in the shopping mall in a new
town (Sha Tin) in the 1980s. After their opening, more and more department
stores, mainly the Japanese ones, expanded their business to the newly
developed districts outside the urban centre.
Department stores started to decentralize, with the development of retailing
market in the new towns.
New towns were important places
for shopping malls to take shape versus the suburbs in the United States. The
current way of designing and building shopping malls originated in the new
towns in the eighties, although the first shopping mall in Hong Kong was built
in the urban centre (Tsim Sha Tsui) in the sixties.
The development of the new towns and the
shopping malls would not be possible without the infrastructure, primarily the
Mass Transit Railway (MTR) and the Kowloon Canton Railway (KCR). In
the United States, the planning and development of shopping malls are
impossible without paying attention to automobiles. For example, malls are
always surrounded by huge parking lots, which show the importance of cars. In
Hong Kong, railway systems play a role more important than cars do. [Figure 8] The
MTR and KCR are so influential that most of the commercially successful
shopping malls are built on top of the MTR stations or linked to the KCR
stations. The development of the shopping malls got mature in the new towns in
the eighties, and then went back to the central area of the city with a triumph
in later time.
The booming of the shopping malls
in the urban centre not only speeded up the fall of the department stores but
also turned the surrounding area of the malls into sites of consumption or
consumption-oriented space, starting the ‘mallification’ of Hong Kong. Shopping
malls used to meet people’s needs and act as a replacement of street lives and
communities in the new towns. In the late 2000s, the malls began to dominate and
engulf the street lives and communities of every part of the city.
3.2
Centralization and
Decentralization of the Department Stores
All the department stores were
centralized in the urban centre of Hong Kong Island and Kowloon before the
1970s. Commodities in the department stores were less affordable for the
general public before the soaring of Hong Kong’s economy, and the Massive
Transit Railway (MTR) which formed the underlying traffic network of Hong Kong
had not been built. Therefore, the retailing business still concentrated in the
urban centre.
In the late sixties, the first
private housing estate of Hong Kong, Mei Foo Sun Chuen (美孚新邨) was built in Lai Chi Kok (荔枝角). The emerging middle-class
started to move out of the city centre to the estate, in pursuit of better
living qualities. Lai Chi Kok was considered an outlying area of Hong Kong at
that time. Therefore, Wing On’s opening of the Mei Foo Sun Chuen Branch there
in 1974 was considered pioneering.
In the seventies, the phase-one new
towns construction planned by the government started. The new towns were Tsuen
Wan (荃灣), Sha Tin (沙田) and Tuen Mun (屯門) (please refer to Figure 3 for the locations). Among these towns, the
first large-scale shopping mall was built in Sha Tin - New Town Plaza in the
80s. When the mall was first complete, the property development company, Sun Hung Kai Properties Ltd. (新鴻基地產發展有限公司), had difficulty in having a large-scale
retailer operate an anchor store there, mainly because of the political
uncertainties initiated by the Sino-British negotiations over the sovereignty
of Hong Kong between the Prime Ministers Zhao Ziyang (趙紫陽) of the People's Republic of China and Margaret
Thatcher of the United
Kingdom in the early eighties. When the crisis of confidence in Hong Kong was
at its peak, Sun Hung Kai Properties agreed to reduce the rate to half the
initial offering price. Yaohan thus got the 10-year lease of operating in the
New Town Plaza at a very favourable price, and became the first Japanese
department store which opened a store in the new towns away from the urban
centre.
After Yaohan’s opening in the New
Town Plaza in Sha Tin in 1983, more and more Japanese department stores
explored the new markets in the regions outside the well developed urban
centre. In the meantime, more Japanese stores were opened in Causeway Bay (five
stores in the district by the end of the eighties),
one of the commercial districts in the urban centre of Hong Kong Island, making
the place a well known shopping precinct for both the locals and tourists.
Later the place developed into a large district of consumption with department
stores and shopping malls being the landmarks and nodal points of a network composed
of streets lined with shops. These landmarks and nodal points were reference
points for people to meet, travel and shop in the district. For example, the door front of the Japanese department
store SOGO in Causeway Bay has been
the landmark for gathering in the district [Figure 10]; Daimaru (大丸),
another Japanese department store, has been the name of the terminal stop for
the mini-buses going to the centre area of Causeway Bay, even after its closure
in Hong Kong in December 1998. Therefore, 1980s is the decade when the Japanese department stores started
to decentralize and at the same time did not lose their ground in the urban
area.
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Figure 9: The door front of SOGO (崇光百貨) in Causeway Bay (銅鑼灣) in August 2010
As mentioned briefly in Section 3
of Chapter 1, 1980s was a disastrous decade for the national products
department stores in Hong Kong, and actually also a hard time for the local
department stores. The national products department stores suffered severely in
the retailing business because of their inability to react or adapt to the
change in the consumer culture, as discussed in chapter two. The second reason
is they had more restrictions than the other department stores. Their products
were imported from mainland China, but they were not allowed to negotiate with the
manufacturers. They could only do so in the trade fairs organized by the
distributor Chinese Resources, a state-owned enterprise. Furthermore, their
products prices were standardized by The Hongkong & Kowloon General
Merchandise Merchants’ Association Ltd. (港九百貨業商會). Only when the stores located in the areas
with high rent could they raise their prices by around 5%. Although the
national products department stores made some attempts to reform their
companies like redecorating the stores and improving the staff quality, their
efforts came too late and seemed to be in vain.
For the local department stores, their failure lies in their poor management. They
did not have a clear system of controlling the number of stock and pricing their
products, and they usually had poor management in human resources because their
businesses were run on a family basis.
The vigorous competition in the retailing market and the emergence of the
specialty stores which provided high level of service and expertise also count
for their downturn. Therefore, in the urban centre, the businesses of the
Japanese department stores were reinforced and the ones of the national
products and local department stores diminished.
In the nineties, department
stores started to have difficulty in running businesses in the urban area due
to the ever-rising rent and the increase in the logistics expense. Matsuzakaya and Isetan, for example, closed their department
stores in Hong Kong due to high rent. The heyday of the Japanese department stores ended after the 1997 Asian
Financial Crisis hit Hong Kong. A lot of Japanese department stores were either
bankrupt or purchased by local enterprises. For instance, all stores of Yaohan and
The Daimaru in Hong Kong were closed on 21 November 1997 and in December 1998
respectively; SOGO Hong Kong was bankrupt in 2000, and was purchased and
operated by Lifestyle International Holdings (利福國際集團有限公司) now. The
department stores in Hong Kong either moved to the places with lower rent which
were usually the regions outside the urban centre like the new towns, or moved
into shopping malls and became their anchor stores. The department stores were
no longer destinations of shoppers nor concentrated in the urban centre. They were
scattered sparsely in every part of Hong Kong.
In the
2000s, even in the regions outside the urban centre did the department stores
have hardship in running businesses. For example, four branches of the big Japanese department
store JUSCO were closed from 2004 to 2010 in Tsz Wan Shan (慈雲山) and
Lok Fu (樂富) of Wong Tai Sin district (黃大仙區), Tseung
Kwan O (將軍澳) of Sai Kung district (西貢區), and Tai Po district(大埔區). In the urban centre, even the oldest and
most experienced department stores could not hold their businesses. For
instance, two branches of one of the oldest department stores in Hong Kong -
Wing On were closed in February 2004 and the last department store of Chinese
Resources, a state-owned enterprise, was closed on 8 April 2005. Now, it is quite
difficult to find a large-scale department store in Hong Kong. Certain big
companies running department stores still exist, but the scale and size of
their stores are getting more and more like a supermarket.
3.3
The Shopping Malls and the
Development of the New Towns
The development of the shopping
malls is inseparable from the development of the new towns in Hong Kong, versus
the suburbs in the United States. In suburbs, people live in houses with
private gardens; in new towns, people live in high-rise residential towers with
collective facilities. New towns are large scale residential development
planned by the government to solve the problems caused by the high density dwellings
and the scarcity of land in the urban centre, and at the same time to provide
Hong Kong citizens with better living qualities. Strictly speaking, these towns
were not completely new. Traditional Chinese towns and villages existed for
centuries in many of these towns like Tuen Mun (屯門), Tai Po (大埔) and Sha Tin (沙田), well
before Hong Kong became the colony under the British governance starting in
1842. In the early years of Hong Kong being a colony, the development clustered
around the Victoria Harbour. The decentralized mode of urban development only
started in 1973. Governor MacLehose (麥理浩) launched a New Towns Development Programme to implement his ’10-year
Housing Target’. Three phases of new towns have been constructed since. Phase-one
new towns are of larger population, when compared to phase-two and phase-three,
which are mainly accommodated in public housing. These towns are Tsuen Wan (荃灣)(the new
town is named in 1959), Sha Tin (1967) and Tuen Mun (1967). Phase-two
towns are smaller and have a balance between private and public housing. These
towns are Tai Po (1979), Fanling (粉嶺)/Sheung Shui (上水) (1979) and
Yuen Long (元朗) (1979). Phase-three towns are more diverse
in function, and are mainly for the middle class. These towns are Tseung Kwan O
(將軍澳) (1982), Tin Shui Wai (天水圍) (1982) and Tung Chung (東涌) (1991).
However, the planning of the new towns had
little to do with the existing city fabric and contexts except the land
ownership issues of the indigenous inhabitants. The government planned the new
towns, influence by the Garden City movement, by zoning. Under the outline
zoning plans, certain numbers of activities and facilities have to be provided
to make the town self-sufficient and balance in the development. The new towns
possess comprehensive social, community and healthcare infrastructure that they
are almost like individual cities. The shopping malls then came naturally to
the centre of these new towns, being typical models of condensation of
commercial, retailing and consuming activities under capitalism. These shopping
malls were big and imbedded into the network of residential towers and traffic
terminal in the podiums, footbridges and the ground level.
Although the first shopping mall of
Hong Kong was not built in the new town, the prevailing mode of developing,
designing, building and management of the composite buildings with residential
towers and shopping malls originated in the new towns in the 1980s. The first
mall of Hong Kong was built in Tsim Sha Tsui, a tourist spot in the urban
centre, as we discussed in the last chapter.
In the 80s, a lot of new towns
were complete and a lot of people moved into these towns. Large-scale shopping
malls were first built in Sha Tin (New Town Plaza) and Taikoo Shing (Cityplaza)
as condensation of commercial activities and provision of daily necessities. Although
Taikoo Shing is not a new town but a newly developed residential district on
Hong Kong Island, it shares a lot of similarities in terms of urban planning
and development. Therefore, it is included here as an example showing how the
shopping malls has been developing in Hong Kong. Citiyplaza in Taikoo Shing is
a typical example of shopping mall acting as the centre of the residential
development [Figure 10]. In the beginning, retail merchants were doubtful about
opening their shops in the outlying places, as we discussed in the last section
about the first department store moving into the New Town Plaza in Sha Tin. But
after the Shatin train station was in use, more and more shops moved into the
shopping mall and the mall turned out to be a success. The importance and
influence of infrastructure to the development of the shopping malls will be
discussed in the next section.
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Figure 10: (The diagrams are taken from Year III Selina’s Group (Fall
2006) of The Architecture Department, The University of Hong Kong; The photo is
taken from Google Street View in 2010.)
After the success of the New Town
Plaza and the Cityplaza as precedent cases, more and more shopping malls were
built, in commercial districts and residential districts. The developers in
Hong Kong started to experiment with the possibilities in gaining maximum
profits by developing shopping malls together with offices and hotels or with
private housing estates. By building these functions with the malls, the
developers secure a steady number of visitors, and thus are able to sell off or
let the shops and the residential units for higher prices.
Residential towers with a
shopping mall as a podium on the first few floors become a successful and
efficient commercial model that it becomes a trend or even formula for
developers to build mixed-use real estate development. A lot of residential
developments in the new towns after 1980s are built with this formula. You can
always find a big shopping mall in the new towns, and usually there will be
more than one mall and the malls are often connected to each other with footbridges.
The most extreme case of this
kind of development is the region around Tseung Kwan O (將軍澳) .
Most of the buildings are built on top of a huge podium which is either a
shopping mall or car park. The malls and the car parks are connected and form a
huge network. This network is elevated from the ground and makes the streets
and roads on the ground purely functional for vehicles. There is no street life
under such mode of development. The network of pedestrians is formed above the
ground by the shopping malls and the footbridges; on the ground level, the
network of vehicles is formed by roads and highways which are planned for the
vehicles but cannot be easily crossed by pedestrians; under the ground, there
is a huge network of Mass
Transit Railway (MTR) connecting the living complex to other parts of Hong Kong
[Figure 11]. We can go there without visiting its outdoor environment and walking
on the ground, but it is quite unavoidable not to pass the shopping malls,
unless we drive.
Figure
11: The MTR network under the residential developments of Tseung Kwan O (將軍澳)
The Building (Planning)
Regulations of Hong Kong actually have a great influence on shaping the above
mentioned mode of development. According to Regulation 20 Permitted site
coverage in Chapter 123F of the Regulations, the site coverage for a
non-domestic building, or for the non-domestic part of a composite building, could
go up to 100% for the first 15 metres of height, on all three classes of sites
[Figure 12]. The value of shops is in general higher than that of flats in Hong
Kong. Therefore, in order to gain maximum profits, the developers always
develop private housing estates or complexes with shopping malls occupying the
first 15 metres, after discovering the commercial potential of the malls in the
80s.
To conclude with, the current
mode of developing and designing large-scale shopping malls with residential
programmes originated in the new towns and some other newly developed
residential districts in the 1980s, shaped by the Building (Planning)
Regulations of Hong Kong. The ideology of the developments is purely commercial
and functional, with the aim of making maximum profits and achieving the most
efficient logistics flow. Under the New Towns Development Programme, a lot of
middle class and working class people have moved to the new towns and their way
of living and practice of using space have changed due to the provision of
collective outdoor and indoor spaces and facilities. Their travelling in the
mass transit public transport in daily life has diminished and degraded the
life of the streets, that a lot of people turn inward to shopping malls for
their social and daily activities. Although not all of the shopping malls in
Hong Kong are developed with this mode, for example the Times Square was built
with offices and the Grand Century Place was developed with offices and a
hotel, it has a significant effect on the Hong Kong society and the urban development,
which will be discussed in the next few sections. In the last decade, more and
more residential complexes are built with this mode and shopping malls become
ubiquitous in Hong Kong.
3.4
The Shopping Malls and the
Infrastructure
The development of the shopping
malls and new towns in Hong Kong are greatly influenced by the development of
the infrastructure of the city, primarily the Mass Transit Railway (MTR). This
is mainly because most of the people in Hong Kong take public transportation for
commuting rather than driving their own vehicles. The frequent use of public
transportation leads the development of the malls in Hong Kong to deviate from
the American shopping mall topology which is automobile-driven. A new topology
of shopping malls emerged in Hong Kong during the 1980s.
MTR was an underground railway
network connecting the existing urban fabric of the city, mainly on Hong Kong
Island and Kowloon. The mass construction of the MTR started in the 70s, the
decade in which a lot of new towns and new living districts, for instance Tsuen
Wan, Sha Tin and Taikoo Shing, were being constructed. MTR had such a great
influence on the urban development because it was built in a time when Hong
Kong was transforming from an industrial based society to a service based one
with industries like finance, logistics and tourism. Therefore, the new
construction of the city could be built in response to the MTR railway and
stations; and the planning of the MTR lines and stations could also coordinate
with the development of the city.
Well before the construction of
the underground railway, there was the train railway on the ground – the Kowloon
Canton Railway (KCR). Although the MTR and KCR are run by the same company MTR
Corporation Limited (MTRCL) now, the two terms are used here to refer to the
traffic network underground and on the ground respectively, and their different
functions and roles in the urban development. The train railway KCR connects
Kowloon Peninsula to Lo Wu, a town near the border of mainland China. This
railway formed the backbone of the formation of new towns in the New
Territories in the north of Kowloon and the south of Shenzhen, China. Before
the opening of the East Tsim Sha Tsui Station in 2004, Kowloon Tong was the
only interchange station between the MTR and the KCR.
The construction of MTR linking
the KCR was a good incentive for people to move into the newly developed
residential districts away from the urban centre like Taikoo Shing and the new
towns like Sha Tin. MTR and KCR were powerful infrastructure to decentralize
the population to the periphery of the city. They made the New Towns
Development Programmes plausible and viable. The new towns then became the new
markets for the retailing industry, which formed the background for the genesis
of the shopping malls for Hong Kong people. The New Town Plaza in Sha Tin is a
good example of a shopping mall becomes successful by connecting itself to the
KCR station.
The mass transit public
transportation systems not only facilitated the formation of the shopping malls
in the new towns, but also the ones in the urban centre. For example, The
Landmark (1980) was built on top of the Central MTR station, Times Square
(1994) on top of the Causeway Bay MTR station, Langham Place (2004) on top of
the Mong Kok MTR station, and Elements (2007) on top of the Kowloon MTR station.
On one hand, the connection to the mass transit system ensures the accessibility
to the public and thus makes the malls having a higher number of potential
visitors. On the other hand, shopping malls act as perfect linkage between the
stations and the residential development because the malls are climatically
well controlled indoor environment which protects the passers-by from getting
wet under the rain and from the polluted air.
The case of Union Square with the
shopping mall Elements is the most striking example of constructing a ‘self-sufficient’
living, working and entertaining quarter isolated from its urban contexts with
the help of the underground railway. [Figure 13] It is located on top of the
Kowloon MTR station. Visitors go to the mall mainly by public transport like
MTR, buses and mini-buses. The complex cannot be approached easily by pedestrians
as the site is surrounded by huge roads for vehicles, and it is detached from
and alien to the existing urban fabric in the east. We shall have a more
in-depth look at this type of planning when we talk about the shopping malls
and communities in the next section.
Figure 13: The Union Square in West Kowloon (source: Google Maps)
By looking at the locations and
distribution of the shopping malls, which are usually situated on top of the
MTR stations and linked to the KCR stations, we know how important the mass
transit system is for the retailing and commercial activities, as the presence
of the malls indicate the concentration of these two activities in the regions.
3.5
The Shopping Malls, Department
Stores and Communities
Shopping malls are the central
parts of the communities in the new towns and were parts of the communities in
various districts in the urban centre. In the last two decades, however, the
booming of the shopping malls not only speeded up the fall of the department
stores but also dismantled the communities of the neighbourhoods in the urban
centre. If we adopt the idea that ‘community’ is not a place but a set of
social ties,
the shopping malls have been breaking down the social ties in the neighbourhood.
The traditional communities are not only eroded by the virtualization of
personal relationships in the realm of mass media and on the Internet, but also
are replaced, engulfed or assimilated by the shopping malls and become the
sites of comsumption in nature. In this section, I shall illustrate the
relationship between the shopping malls and communities and how the malls have
been breaking down the social ties in the neighbourhood; in the next section, I
shall illustrate how the shopping malls have been turning the neighbourhoods or
even the while city into sites of consumption.
In the new towns, since most of
the residents came from other parts of the city and were new to the places,
there were no social ties between them and the towns. Although some of the new
towns are located in places with a long history, the indigenous inhabitants
have their own communities and neighbourhoods which are quite isolated from the
new developments planned by the government. The new residents thus had to form
their own communities in the newly built environment composed mainly of residential
towers, podium-top gardens, shopping malls and the leisure facilities provided
by the government like the swimming pools, tennis courts and basketball
playgrounds. Since shopping malls are part of the network which the residents walk
pass and visit in their daily activities as discussed in section 3, the malls
become part of the new neighbourhood in the material sense. In the 80s and 90s,
department stores in these malls were the landmarks or gathering places of the
neighbourhood. For example in Tuen Mun, the Japanese department store Yaohan
was the place where the elderly and housewives stay, communicate with their
neighbours and make new friends. Despite the shopping malls, where rules of
personal conduct are enforced and visitors being monitored, are not formal
public spaces, they belong to the public domain where an exchange between
different social groups is possible and also actually occurs, defined by
Maarten Hajer and Arnold Reijndorp. The
shopping malls and department stores in the new towns are built and opened for
the region; the visitors are mostly the residents in the towns. Therefore, the
shopping malls and department stores in the new towns belong to the
neighbourhoods, unlike those in the urban centre, where the social ties are
formed. They help forming and shaping the new communities in the new towns.
On the contrary, in the urban
centre where there is a long history of urban development, the shopping malls do
not conform to the existing neighbourhoods and city fabric, which could break
down the sophisticated social ties. The arrival of shopping malls in the urban
centre is, of course, not necessarily a bad thing. However, when the shopping
malls in the urban centre do not function as the public domain like those in
the new towns do, after damaging the existing social ties in the
neighbourhoods, it is then a huge issue.
Most of the long-standing neighbourhoods
on Hong Kong Island and in Kowloon are composed of streets. Markets, shops,
stalls and hawkers usually cluster along streets but not in plazas, nor inside
buildings. The streets with retailing activities and stalls opened on both
sides, especially with butcher shops and fish markets which sell live animals,
are called street markets (街市). Some of the famous street
markets are located in Central, Wan Chai and Mong Kok [Figure 14]. Lively
neighbourhoods around streets like these in the urban centre are endangered
under the urban development projects in recent years.
Figure 14: (From left to right) Graham Street (嘉咸街) in Central (中環); Fa Yuen Street (花園街) in Mong Kok (旺角); Tai Yuen Street (太原街) in Wan Chai (灣仔)
After shopping malls become an
essential architectural model for combing various programmes like offices,
hotels and serviced apartments into a unified whole which can generate profits
more effectively, the new developments in Hong Kong usually contain the malls
in the first few floors. Even the large-scale urban redevelopment projects jointly
run by the Urban Renewal Authority (市區重建局)
of the Hong Kong Government and the real estate developers are planned in
similar fashion. Under such a redevelopment project, a diversity of buildings
and street lives are very often replaced by a single monolithic building – the
shopping mall - with a blank exterior. The mall is gigantic and a complete
world into itself that it makes no connection with the surrounding
neighbourhood, except on the logistics and circulation levels which are planned
to draw people in. Some of the daily activities in the neighbourhood are moved
indoor to the mall which is not a genuine public space. In a mall, the behaviors
of the visitors and the activities happening inside are monitored and controlled
by the managing company; interaction and freedom of speech are restricted. The
old inhabitants in the neighbourhood are accustomed to the old ways of using
and performing in the old form of public space. However, their need of keeping
the integrity of the community in the neighbourhood is often neglected. They
are being excluded from the new ‘communities’ by their social lives not
considered in the urban renewal and redevelopment projects which follow the
commercial mode of development. In the busy shopping malls which display all
kinds of new products and target at the consumers with great purchasing power,
the elderly usually become aliens. Therefore, the new social ties in the
neighbourhoods being renewed and redeveloped in the urban centre can hardly be
formed with the qualities found in the past ones.
Another reason why the shopping
malls in the urban centre cannot function as the public domain as the ones in
the new towns do is they are not designed to serve only the surrounding neighbourhoods
but actually the whole city of Hong Kong, probably due to their high land value
and rent. This is the reason why most of the prominent malls in the urban
centre are connected to the MTR network. The malls, overriding the
neighbourhoods outside, are introverted buildings serving an anonymous group of
customers coming from all parts of the city.
Department stores have limited
effects on breaking the social ties in neighbourhoods due to their store sizes.
They do not take up so many building blocks and streets as shopping malls do.
Also, they are now usually located inside shopping malls.
Some people see the shopping mall
as an adapted form of urban public space, or a new type of public space under
capitalism. They think Hong Kong people spend more and more time in the malls
that shopping becomes a way of life. But
they are only true for a certain group of people. Shopping malls are ‘pseudo-public
spaces’ in social-activist critic Mike Davis’s perspective, because of the
subsequent loss of possibilities for interaction and the lack of socioeconomic
riches and diversity of the traditional metropolis due to the surveillance and restriction
in accessibility. Jenneth
Jackson describes the malls as the places which cater exclusively to
middle-class tastes and contain no unsavory bars or pornography shops, no
threatening-looking characters, no litter, no rain, and no excessive heat or
cold; Diane
Ghirardo believes the malls reduce the notion of a public space to a zone
exclusively oriented towards consumption. These
perspectives further explain why a proper community cannot be formed in a
shopping mall. The shopping malls with department stores inside in the new
towns help shaping the communities, and are parts of the neighbourhoods.
However, the communities formed are not complete and healthy because the places
(the malls and the areas nearby) are consumption-oriented in nature.
3.6
Mallification of the City
More and more shopping malls are
built in the last decade, with almost one new gigantic mall complete every
year. In this section, I shall show that the ‘mallification’ of Hong Kong is
not just an impression but an ongoing fact which has a huge influence on the
social lives of the citizens.
In Bart Eeckhout and Steven
Jacobs’s ‘3 Recent Transformations of Urban Public Space’, the
term ‘mallification’ is used to describe the phenomenon that places are
increasingly turned into sites of consumption, while continuing to be publicly
accessible to large parts of the urban population. They see this phenomenon the
material consequence of the privatization of public space in the contemporary
city at an economic level. When
the majority of the urban population turn to these sites of consumption rather
than the traditional public spaces like street markets, parks, promenades and
countryside, the social and cultural activities of the society are more likely
to happen there – the gravity of the social life is shifted to various sites of
consumption.
The main problem, though, is not
the fact that our social spaces are related to consumption, because shopping
street, markets, groceries and so forth – almost all the activities in a contemporary
city – are also related to different forms of consumption. The biggest problem
is that these sites of consumption are becoming more and more like shopping
malls, or being turned into part of the malls – places of monoculture in which
decisions are guided and behaviors controlled in an unnoticeable manner. For
example, most of the shopping malls in Hong Kong do not provide enough
furniture for the visitors to take rest. If they want to do so, they have to go
to cafés, fast-food shops or other retail places where seats are provided. In
these locations, the visitors become the customers and are more likely to spend
money, which they did not expect before entering the malls. Apart from this, visitors
are being guided to walk pass different shops and facilities unconsciously in shopping
malls. The location of escalators, the grouping of shops, the framing of views,
the lighting and many other details are well planned with the intention to keep
the visitors staying inside the malls as long as possible and to direct them to
walk pass as many shops as possible, and thus increase the chance of earning
money from them. One common strategy is to put the food court or the storey
with catering and beverage services on a high floor, so that the visitors have
to travel up and walk pass many shops along the route to eat and drink, as eating
and drinking are big impetus for people to take action. Festival Walk, Times
Square and Langham Place are some famous examples of adopting this strategy.
What is even worse is that in the
last decade there are more and more occasions on which people can hardly avoid walking
in or passing the malls, since the pedestrian and traffic networks are very
often connected to shopping malls. In new towns, these are common scenarios due
to the planning and mode of development as we have discussed in the last three
sections; in the urban centre, this is the aftermath of various revitalization,
renewal and redevelopment projects, jointly carried by the government and real
estate developers, in which a lot of streets, markets and groceries were turned
into shopping malls or parts of them.
One of the most influential
events aggravating the ‘mallification’ of Hong Kong is the privatization of 180
retail and car park properties of the Hong Kong Housing Authority (香港房屋委員會) in
2004. The Link Real Estate Investment Trust (‘The Link’ or ‘The Link
REIT’) (領匯房地產投資信託基金),
managed by The Link Management Limited (領匯管理有限公司), was created to privatize these
properties which are at the proximity of the homes of 40% of the Hong Kong
population. The Link REIT was listed on the Hong Kong
Stock Exchange on 25 November 2005, as part of a divestment exercise by the Hong
Kong Housing Authority,
and 100% of its units were sold at the Initial Global
Offering. The
privatization was an act to demonstrate the
government's commitment to the principle of ‘market leads and
government facilitates'. It implied that a lot of public amenities around the public housing
would become the assets of the managing company and the shareholders who
invested in the Trust in order to making profits. After The Link Management
Limited took over the properties, it launched a series of asset enhancement
measures like renovating the shopping centres to
create additional retail space and improve the access, and bringing in big
chain stores to some flagship centres. For example, the old market in Ming Tak
Shopping Centre (明德商場) in Tseung Kwan O was converted to a new extension of the shopping centre on the
ground floor; in Tsz Wan Shan Shopping Centre (慈雲山中心), new escalators were installed
at the nearby bus terminal to reverse the travel
pattern of the
pedestrians and to provide direct
access to the 5th floor of
the shopping centre; popular retail and dining shops were introduced to the Lung Cheung Plaza (龍翔廣場) in Wong Tai Sin to transform the centre to an exciting shopping destination for tourists and nearby residents.
Shopping centres in Hong Kong were
different from the shopping malls in their catchment areas, types of shops,
management and interior design. Shopping centres were usually less furbished and
trendy in decoration than shopping malls and the shops inside were more
practical with the aim of serving the surrounding neighbourhoods but not
tourists. For example, there were clinics, pharmacies, barber shops, day-care
centres and tutorial schools in shopping centres but seldom did they exist in
shopping malls. The shops in shopping centres were mostly opened by small
entrepreneurs who were very often also working in the shops while the shops in
shopping malls were usually opened by big corporations in which the staff were
employed.
Under the management of the
private enterprise The Link REIT instead of the Hong Kong Housing Authority
which belongs to the Hong Kong government, the shopping centres in different
districts of the city have been converted into shopping malls which run
businesses based on the calculation of expenditures and returns. Even though the
customer overall ratings on some shopping centres increased significantly by
60% after the implementation of the Asset Enhancement Projects, according to the surveys conducted by The Hong Kong
Polytechnic University on the asset enhanced projects in 2006,
several social problems came into view gradually in the subsequence years. For
instance, the rents increased substantially after the renovations of the
shopping centres, which forced a number of small businesses to close down in
2006, 2008 and 2009. Also, the rental contracts with the small entrepreneurs
were terminated selectively, that The Link REIT had been accused of partially
to big chain shops. In November 2009, Hong Kong Doctors Union president Henry Yeung Chiu-fat estimated that more than half of the estate doctors
might leave the housing estates
due to the high rents.
After the privatization, the properties
were run with higher profits and return rates. The shopping centres look better
in appearance, and the class and qualities of the commodities sold inside go
higher and better. Yet, a lot of small shops including those who fulfilled the
basic needs of the neighbourhoods and provided essential services to the nearby
residents were driven away by high rents and big chain shops. The shop choices
are no longer adjusted naturally by the demand of the neighbourhoods but
decided by the managing company. People will find similar types, or even
similar brands, of shops in all the shopping centres being privatized. The
spaces around the public housing with shopping centres are becoming less and
less like neighbourhoods which served and belonged to the local residents in
the past. These spaces are now parts of the shopping malls which have different
expectations, standards and requirements on how to use the spaces properly and
personal behaviours because of the shifts in the target groups and business
model. For the number of retail properties and areas of residence affected, the
privatization of the properties of the Hong Kong Housing Authority in 2004 is
the single most important event accelerating and intensifying the ‘mallification’
of the Hong Kong society.
4
Conclusion
4.1
The Decline of the Department
Stores and the Rise of the Shopping Malls
The decline of the department
stores and the rise of the shopping malls in Hong Kong are the complex amalgamating
results of many interweaving factors like the changes in the consumer culture, economy,
planning, urban development, government policies and many other events
throughout the history of the city. We have discussed about these factors and
events in previous chapters and sections specifically, and it is time to look
at all of them in a bigger picture now.
Before the massive development of
the new towns and the huge population attained in these towns in the 1980s,
consumer culture had a more decisive role in affecting the success and failure
of a retailing model. The retailing stores competed with each other in terms of
the quality, class and price of the daily necessities they sold and the basic
services they provided. Among these retailing stores, the department stores
were successful. They were the consumption landmarks of the neighbourhoods,
mainly in the urban centre. Going to department stores was not a daily activity
but a serious journey.
When the affluent middle class
was forming in the 70s and a lot of them started moving to the new towns with
the working class, they began to ask for something more than just fulfilling basic
needs in life. Also, their way of living and practice of using space have
altered due to the change in the environment (the provision of collective
outdoor and indoor spaces and facilities in the new towns) and the commuting
means (the use of mass transit public transport in daily life because of their
distant locations from the urban centre). 1980s was the decade when the urban
development had a more prominent effect on the retailing industry. At that
time, the shopping malls appeared in the new residential districts and
fulfilled both the basic and social needs of the new residents. They functioned
as leisure destinations, with the help of the department stores inside, and
helped shape the emerging communities. The Japanese department stores saw the
potential in these new markets and started to expand and decentralize, while
the local and national department stores were reforming their businesses in the
urban centre in order to survive and compete with the Japanese ones. With the
soaring economy of Hong Kong, the land price and rent in the urban centre were
rising rapidly, which forced a lot of local and national department stores with
poor management to close down. The pursuit of lifestyle in form of consumption in
the next decade helped reinforce the positions of the shopping malls and the
Japanese department stores in the retailing market. In the same decade, the
real estate developers started to discover the huge potential and high
efficiency of combing shopping malls with other programmes like residential
housing, offices and hotels to make money. The trends of the above development
of the department stores and shopping malls continued without much deviation
until the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis hit Hong Kong.
Although 1997 is a year with tremendous
importance in Hong Kong politics that the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned
from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China, the economy and the
retailing industry were not directly affected. This was the result of the ‘One
country, two systems’ principle agreed by the two countries in the Sino-British Joint Declaration which ensured
the stability of Hong Kong’s society and economy. Hong Kong could keep its capitalist economic
and political systems for 50 years.
The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis
had a much greater impact on the economy and retailing industry than the huge
political change. Many parent companies of the Japanese department stores
suffered a colossal loss, and had to close down their businesses in Hong Kong.
These department stores were either
bankrupt or purchased by local enterprises. The epoch of the Japanese
department stores in Hong Kong ended abruptly, though the remaining ones were still
influential in the city when compared to other department stores. The local and
national department stores also suffered severely and diminished even further
in terms of the number of companies and their branch stores. Since most of the
shopping malls belonged to the government and the real estate developers who
owned the lands and the properties, they were less prone to being shut down. Also,
since the malls are usually parts of the fabric of the neighbourhoods with a
lot of residential housing or located in the commercial districts with many
office towers, there are constant number of visitors, which are the residents
and the workers in these cases respectively, which keep the businesses running.
The economic factors have been more essential in determining whether a
retailing business can survive and will be successful or not since then. The
above events also tell us how critical the resource of lands and the value of
properties are for doing businesses in Hong Kong.
2003 was another disastrous year
for the economy and the retailing businesses in Hong Kong. The outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) kept tourists from visiting Hong Kong of
which tourism is one of the pillars in its service economy. Other businesses
were also stagnant. Although the Mainland and Hong Kong Closer Economic Partnership Arrangement (CEPA) was signed, which were beneficial
to Hong Kong entrepreneurs and enterprises entering the Mainland markets, and
the Individual Visit Scheme was launched, which drew in a huge influx of
Mainland visitors, to boost Hong Kong economy, the department stores did not
benefit much from these policies and continued to close down because of the
high rent and low number of visitors. A lot of Mainland tourists visited the
shopping malls under the scheme, and the retail rent went up dramatically even
though the economy of Hong Kong was still recovering. The department stores in
the malls thus had a very hard time surviving.
Since the discovery of the commercially
efficient model of developing shopping malls with high-rise residential housing
on top, more and more gigantic shopping malls have been built in the new towns
and later also in the urban centre. People start to notice the overwhelming
number of shopping mall may lead to a monoculture society in which people could
only shop. They also noticed a lot of characteristic old neighbourhoods were
redeveloped into the same kind of commercial development under the
collaboration of the Urban Renewal Authority and the real estate developers.
Together with the privatization of 180 retail and car park properties, which
are at the proximity of the homes of 40% of the Hong Kong population, of the
Hong Kong Housing Authority in 2004, the ‘mallification’ of Hong Kong was
evident. The shopping malls were not just taking over the businesses of the
department stores but our social space and life. Because the malls exist ubiquitously
in the city and are parts of the neighbourhood fabric, we basically have no
choice but to visit them while carrying out different daily activities. Under
these conditions, consumer culture becomes something the shopping malls
manipulate to promote themselves and to attract visitors, like their using of
cultural elements to establish their brands and positions in the consumption
market.
The shopping malls produce retail
spaces while the department stores ‘consume’ them. This is the key factor in
constituting the fall of the department stores and the rise of the shopping
malls after the year 2000. In the past, there were a lot of different factors
influencing a retailing model. Now, several forces dominate over the others,
which does not make life easier but more difficult. The competition in the
retailing industry is fierce, and the markets are ‘monopolized’ by the shopping
malls in the present days.
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