Glorified Modernity to Nostalgic Resilience: Reconstructing the Representational Space of Taman Anggrek Mall through Social Media Narratives

Abstract

The paper investigates the social production of space in Taman Anggrek Mall, a luxury mixed-use superblock built in 1996 in Jakarta, Indonesia, through social media narratives. Once the largest mall and home to the first ice rink in Southeast Asia, Taman Anggrek Mall was designed to embody modernity and the consumerist middle-class of 1990s postcolonial Indonesia and is a form of land commodification that is ever-present in urban Jakarta – a city flourishing under the culture of consumerism. As we are moving forward in digitalization, social media opens another dimension in the dynamic aspect of collective memory formation. In our content-starved society, the spatial dimension of social media archives introduces new pathways to mnemonic practices in reconstructing the memory of places, and in turn, shaping our perception of these places in lieu to the collective memory. This study aims to understand the relationship between the collective memory production through social media and its affect to our spatial perception in the lived space, through the context of Taman Anggrek Mall.