Arkadia Mall
28 February 2010
Arkadia Mall is on the Corniche el Nil, a mall right next door to these very fancy shiny towers that deceivingly masked the messy workshops of the Bulaq neighbourhood.. Chris had read about Arkadia Mall, from Mona Abaza’s articles written a few years back as an example of a trendy, new mall and an example of the growing mall culture in Cairo.
We had just jumped in a taxi from the Turgoman, the drive is short but there is a marked difference in life outside the malls and inside them. Next to the dead mall at Turgoman, life is bustling outside on the streets. Buildings are overflowing with activity, the streets are bustling with honking cars, delivery trucks, kiosks and vendors. Despite its proximity to the Nile the neighbourhood we drive through, Bulaq, is quite rundown, chaotic and relatively ungentrified. The streets are full of people and are lined with kiosks and workshops. Large former factory type spaces are split into smaller sections, occupied by mechanics, butchers, small cafes and open doors leading to piles of industrial junk.
Entering Arkadia mall, it reminds me of some of the older malls in the Gulf, the types I used to go to when I was growing up in Bahrain in the 80s. The design is similar, but I think that this mall was built more recently than that. As you enter, there ramps spiralling upwards taking you to various floors of the mall. The shops in the mall are a mix between a few international brands and more local shops and boutiques. The mall itself is quite empty save for the workers in the stores and the cafe in the main atrium and several random men leaning on the railings at various floors of the mall. Chris and I speculate; people watching perhaps? Cairo’s human surveillance net? Bored young men with nothing to do? Shop workers taking breaks?
We wander up the maze of ramps taking us through the mall. Walking around there are a few screens; a couple of ATM machines, a strange life-size ‘Shrek’ statue stands near the entrance with a dead screen in its belly and a few in the atrium.
Most notably, suspended a few floors high is a huge screen, made up of 25 large flat screens hangs dormant.
Riding the glass elevator down to the cafe in the atrium, we are surrounded by business suit wearing crowd of men and women. Perhaps the upper floors of the building are occupied by offices of some sort.
In the cafe, an upmarket cafe selling salads, sandwiches and cappuccinos, with bow-tied waiters, we order some lunch and notice a couple of screens next to each other on one side of the cafe. Even the faux-Vienna coffee house surroundings still warrant a screen. Echoing the theme of the mall, abandoned, passed sell by date, even this more lively part of the mall has a dead screen in it. It is more markedly malfunctioning as the large broken screen sits just behind a functioning new LCD screen playing Melody TV an Arabic Music channel.
Talaat Harb Mall in Downtown is a much more successful shopping mall, if I were to judge by the number of visitors.
My main thought while in Arkadia was about maintenance. Why so many broken screens? Why not fix them or remove them?
(* Arkadia, we later discovered, was the scene of a sensational murder several years ago, a fight between two rich young men. There was a lot of press coverage, which was obviously not great press for the mall and may have triggered the mall’s decline…)
Amal Khalaf
