The Mall Is the Region's True Public Square

On a Friday evening in almost any Gulf city, the closest thing to a town square is not a square at all. It is a mall. Families circulate past the fountains, teenagers conduct their careful courtships near the food court, grandmothers hold court on benches while children orbit, and the whole sweep of public life, the seeing and being seen that a piazza once hosted, unfolds under a skylight and a steady draft of cool air.

The open public square is a Mediterranean inheritance, designed for a climate that rewards lingering outdoors. For much of the year here, the street at midday is not a place to gather but a place to cross quickly. Heat did to the plaza what censorship never could: it emptied it. The mall, climate-controlled and generous with seating, simply absorbed the function. People did not abandon public life. They followed it indoors.

But this square has an owner, and that changes everything. A public plaza belongs, at least in theory, to everyone; a mall belongs to a company. You may stroll, but you may not protest. You may sit, provided you have bought, or look like you might. The unspoken rules are enforced not by law but by management, and the camera is always more polite than the policeman and just as present.

This is the quiet trade the region has made, often without naming it: the comfort and safety of private space in exchange for the openness that made the old square genuinely public. It is a good bargain on a forty-degree afternoon and a poorer one when you remember what a square is supposed to be for.

The mall is welcoming in the way a host is welcoming, which is to say selectively. It is built for the family and the consumer, and it quietly edits out those who fit neither. The laborer at the end of his shift, the worker with nothing to spend, the loiterer with no purchase in mind: the architecture is not designed for them, and they tend to know it. The genuinely public square asks nothing of you. The mall always, gently, asks.

And yet it would be too easy to sneer. Within its commercial frame, the mall does real civic work. It is where the new arrival learns the rhythms of the city, where strangers from a dozen nationalities share an escalator without incident, where a teenager experiences a first taste of unsupervised freedom. It hosts the national-day crowds and the Ramadan nights. If this is not quite citizenship, it is something adjacent to it, rehearsed in the language of retail.

Perhaps the question is not whether the mall has replaced the square, but whether we will ever build squares again that can compete with it: shaded, walkable, open to the air and to everyone, places where the only price of entry is showing up. Until then the region will keep holding its public life where the temperature is bearable and the doors, however watched, stay open. We have simply moved the agora indoors and handed someone the keys.

The irony is that while malls offer a form of civic engagement, they also reinforce social hierarchies and economic divides. The space is curated for consumption rather than conversation, and it reflects the broader dynamics of power in these cities. Yet, as long as the climate remains inhospitable to open-air gathering, the mall will continue to serve as the region's de facto public square.

It is a pragmatic solution, but one that comes with its own set of compromises and constraints. The trade-off between comfort and freedom is starkly evident in these spaces, where the rules are written not by democratic processes but by corporate interests. As such, the mall stands as both a refuge from the heat and a reminder of the limitations placed on public life.

In this context, the question remains: can we ever reclaim the idea of an open square that is truly for everyone? Until then, the region will continue to navigate its social and political landscape within the cool confines of these commercial enclaves.