ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that Manado’s Boulevard Commercial Project (BCP) is characterized not by global practices but by local appropriations. The carefully orchestrated artificial environment of the BCP shopping malls is a magnet for both individuals and groups. While the owners of the BCP malls aim to create a distinctive environment that encourages consumption, the local context and its cultures are neither passive nor impotent, but inhabit and appropriate the new urban spaces and transform them according to their own living patterns and demands. Moreover, the BCP malls’ efforts to accommodate external requests have surpassed civic and city-scale public activities. The BCP has become machinery that, while offering a new and inviting scene, intensifies and assembles the local, its representations, manifestations, and demonstrations. The BCP malls have thus taken over the roles that were traditionally ascribed to the city’s municipal square.
