Glodok, also known as Pecinan or Chinatown since the Dutch colonial era, is considered the biggest 'Chinatown' in Indonesia.
Glodok, and contiguous Mangga Dua, are now one of the biggest shopping areas in Southeast Asia, with many shopping markets and malls. The area stretches from Pancoran street to Gunung Sahari street and has approximately 500,000 m2 of shopping centres. The area dates back to colonial times when in November 1740, Dutch East Indies Company (VOC) designated Glodok as a residential area for ethnic Chinese.
The Fate of Shopping Malls in Jakarta
Posted On 29 Sep 2017
By : Tenissa Tjahjono
Is it true that shopping malls are becoming less attractive hence they are now ‘dying’ in Jakarta?
This article is reporting on the current trends for consumers shopping behaviours in Glodok 2017. In 1992 Glodok was a thriving district for shopping and trade, including a vibrant street culture that was sustained by the traders who lived and worked in this area associated with the ethnic Chinese Indonesian community.
How has Glodok changed over the last 25 years?
This is one of the conclusions of this news piece:
Jakarta, GIVnews.com – In the digital era in which people rely heavily on technologies and the internet, there is a perception that physical shops are competing against online shops or e-commerce. This leads one to wonder on the fate of the abundant shopping malls in Jakarta, a busy and crowded metropolitan.
Is it true that shopping malls are becoming less attractive hence they are now ‘dying’ in Jakarta? Shall the notion be true, what are the reasons for the decreasing attractiveness of shopping malls?
According to a property consultant agency Savills Indonesia, the vacancy rate of shopping malls in Jakarta appeared to gradually increase. In the first semester of this year, the vacancy rate had increased by from 10.3% to 10.8%. Furthermore, the result showed that shopping malls under the ‘middle up’ category experience the highest vacancy rate of 19.5% in 2017. This is an increase from a vacancy rate of 16.1% in 2016.
We may also have heard news about stores having low occupancy rates, some of them were even forced to close their outlets. PT. Matahari Department Store Tbk. had to close their two stores in Pasaraya Manggarai and Pasaraya Blok M. Shops at Pasar Glodok, Pasar Tanah Abang, WTC Mangga Dua and Mangga Dua Mall also suffered from more or less similar situation. So, why are these shopping centers dying and unable to survive despite their successful history?
Let us not forget the fact that there are also simply too many shopping malls in Jakarta. How do you expect high occupancy rates or survival when one mall is built next to another and there is nothing that makes every one of them unique?
Culture Trip?
Internet guides to shopping in Jakarta are keen to project the "unique" atmosphere of Indonesia's largest Chinatown which contrasts with the new developments that do not accommodate the traditional shopping patterns of those consumers who do not have disposable income. Street culture in scenes like these may at some point be swept away.
Ghosts of the past still haunt the urban spaces of old Glodok while new developments erase its unique character
During the Chinatown riots of 1998, shopkeeper Tjie Thian Siak was lucky to escape harm. The mobs were more interested in looting electronics, raiding banks and burning tyres than they were in stealing house paint from his small store.
When the violence stopped, Siak, now 69, decided to stay in the neighbourhood. But he says many of the Chinese-Indonesian families who ran furniture stores here left and never came back.
“There’s not that many left, they are afraid,” says Siak. “They moved to residential areas: that’s why it’s quiet in the evening. Before the riots it was still busy until nine or 10pm. Now the shops close at five.”
Jakarta may be a city on the move – a metropolis of constant buzz, and what feels like perpetual construction – but one street in the Indonesian capital hasn’t changed much in almost 20 years.
An excerpt from Waiting for Glodok: the ghost street haunted by Indonesia’s riots with words by Kate Lamb and photographs by Rony Zakaria, from the Guardian webpage Guardian Jakarta live in the Cities project:
Tue 22 Nov 2016 09.18 GMT
Postscript
A place to go looting
The memory of the riots and extreme violence that took place in Glodok in May 1998, and that was focused on the ethnic Chinese community is still very present in those that live, or used to live, in this part of Jakarta.
Update
20 Years of Reformasi by Arzia Tivany Wargadiredja
May 21 2018, 10:55am
Reflections of May '98 Looters, Victims of the New Order's 'Organized Riots'
A week before the fall of Gen. Suharto, riots broke out in Jakarta targeting the country's ethnic Chinese communities and their businesses. Now experts say rioters and looters were tricked into escalating the unrest by the government.
Mulyadi remembered the day like it was just yesterday—it was the third day of the most chaotic week Indonesia since its independence in 1965—and called it the "Liberation Day", though the event is more commonly referred to as the May 1998 riots. "It was really a liberation day," Mulyadi told me at a coffee kiosk in Grogol last week.
"We were free to walk into shops and take things because everywhere was chaos."
When Mulyadi arrived at Roxy Mas, the worst of it had not yet started. The situation began to escalate when people realized police officers were blocking the entry to the shopping mall. Mulyadi remembered hearing some men encouraging others to loot shops owned by ethnic Chinese Indonesians inside the mall. Those men were the first ones to throw stones into the storefronts. The mob became violent. The police officers shot rubber bullets and tear gas, forcing some people to back away, but many more got away.
"Eventually the police blockade couldn’t handle the crowd," Mulyadi said. "People went in through the front basement, and we were tear gassed by the police inside."
Not every police officer was trying to keep looters out. Some of them let people take a few things, but not too many, Mulyadi said. Mulyadi and his friends managed to grab dozens of clothes but they were held at gunpoint by several police officers on the way out. "They told us to put down those clothes, so I walked out of there with nothing but bruises on my legs," Mulyadi said.
Mulyadi and his friends were still curious, so they walked to a nearby mall called Topas (now Roxy Square), which had less police presence. When they arrived, the mall was practically empty, and burning. Eventually, Mulyadi came home only with a can of cookies.
"I did it maybe because everyone was there, too," Mulyadi told me. "And also because I’m pribumi, so nothing was going to happen to me."
When the riot broke in Glodok, five kilometers away from Tomang, Junaedi and his five friends went to the heart of the chaos. The road was quiet. Smoke was coming out near the electronics malls Plaza Orion and Harco Glodok, and Junaedi could hear the sound of rubber bullets from a distance. People were running away from the chaos, but instead of following suit, then 17-year-old Junaedi and his friends ran towards the malls, where the windows were all broken.
There, strangers were encouraging him to take whatever he wanted from the pile of goods scattered on the street outside of the mall.
"This only happens once a year… once a year, man," one of them said.
Junaedi was conflicted. "I wasn’t sure whether to take them or not," he said. "People were throwing out stuff from inside the Plaza."
Junaedi saw tens of people going inside Plaza Orion, passing electronics to one another, from 32-inch TV sets to Walkmans.
Junaedi and his friends went home with a walkman they found on the street. They didn’t dare go inside. On the way home, Junaedi met an old man who gave him an 14-inch TV set. "The old man said, 'One for me, one for you,'" Junaedi said.
Junaedi told me all of this on one quiet afternoon, at the Glodok intersection, right across Plaza Orion. Junaedi sat on a wooden chair with a cigarette on his hand, recalling one of the worst days in Indonesian history. Twenty years later, he told me that what he did was a big mistake.
Right before the fall of the New Order, it was just as chaotic in Klender, East Jakarta. The burning of Yogya Plaza Klender took the lives of more than 400 people. Samsul Hilal, then 33 years old, was in the building to look for his nephew and neighbors.
He went inside just as fire broke out the second floor. From where he stood, he saw piles of tires around the stairs, blocking the exit. Samsul believed somebody was trapping him and hundreds others on purpose.
"The tires, the stairs, were set on fire inside," Samsul told me in his home. "It felt like a set-up. Earlier people were fighting, and then they destroyed the mall."
The crowd inside was mostly kids and teenagers pushing their luck to get as many things as possible. Samsul remembered one young boy asking him to grab a chandelier from inside the burning mall. Samsul agreed in the hope that the boy would leave. Instead, the boy walked upstairs, joining hundreds of others. Many of them never made it out alive.
"They weren’t afraid," Samsul told me. "They went upstairs, and once there they couldn’t go down. The stairs were too crowded, people were stuck. Some were stepped on, some fell over,” Samsul said. "It was the hardest times. That’s why people were looting. The economy was bad."
Before Samsul left the building, he stopped at a supermarket on the ground floor and stole seven bottles of mosquito repellents to share with his neighbors, and a kettle. It was dengue season at the time.
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