ORCHARD TOWERS AND PALAIS RENAISSANCE : AN INTERSECTION OF GENDERED WORKINGS AND POWER RELATIONS WITHIN THE RETAIL LANDSCAPE

Abstract

Retail spaces have historically been gendered to be feminine in nature. The strong relationship between women and consumption began in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when rapid industrialization shifted from home-based cottage industries to organized large-scale conglomerations. The segregation between the public world of work and politics and private world of the home brought on the theory of separate spheres between men and women. In a bid to exercise their economic right, women engaged in conspicuous consumption.

Yet, in contemporary Singapore, these spaces of consumption, which very often comes in the form of a shopping mall, have been appropriated by all and sundry, to be containers of social life. Preliminary fieldwork has placed the sexualized landscape of Orchard Towers as an urban enigma, perched against the quintessentially feminine character of its aristocratic neighbour, Palais Renaissance. With these two malls in question, this dissertation examines the importance of space as a generative in the production of gender relations, and, conversely, the implication of gender in spatial re-productions. It reveals the socio-urban dynamics at play in the production of this specific peculiarity along Orchard Road, and how gendered workings and its syntheses with its environment, can be exacted as political instruments of control.