Opinion | Hong Kong’s malls should be more than a shopping paradise for the rich

I recently left my corporate job to pursue my personal goals. Once you leave a desk job, you tend to spend a lot more time on your feet. If your diary entries say 11am for coffee chat in Sheung Wan, a 3pm interview in Tai Po and a 7pm Cantonese class in Sha Tin, you’re inevitably caught in the liminal spaces of shopping centres and cafes.

Many will relate to this experience. You stumble off public transport, all too aware of the sweat from a passenger that has somehow transferred onto your shirt. You impatiently wait for the lights to change, squinting up at the unrelenting sun. Your legs are tired from a day on your feet, but you dash across the road into a mall where a gust of air conditioning hits your face. Oasis.

But then you spend 5 minutes walking around looking for a place to sit. That turns into 15 minutes. You do the rounds inside every Starbucks, Pret a Manger and McDonald’s. Maybe you even consider shelling out for a seat and a coffee at Fuel Espresso.

But even that’s not an option as every seat is taken by insurance agents, bankers and tai tais on their post-lunch lingers. So you stand, legs tired from the fruitless wandering and shoulders heavy from carrying your desk around in a bag. The thought of sitting cross-legged outside a Louis Vuitton store and opening your laptop to answer a few emails doesn’t seem all that crazy.

Some urbanists argue that this is an injustice. Enrique Penalosa, former mayor of Bogota, Colombia, and a champion of building better cities through more public spaces, says that “if the place to go for a walk and see people in a city is the mall, it’s a sick city. In the best cities like Manhattan, Paris or Madrid, people go to public spaces.”