THAT JOB, of course, entails luring people and making them want to part with their money for things that they may or may not need. This has opened malls to criticisms that they are promoting hyperconsumerism, a perception that is aided in part by the sheer massiveness of many of these centers (which also invites the "Goliath is evil" line of thinking), but prompted mostly by their endless parade of come-ons and ads. With more than half of the population mired in poverty, even a subtle goading of the impulse to buy and to indulge the materialist craving may seem offensive to some people. That malls have perfected the art of persuasion probably makes it seem all the more obscene. The Ayala Center Makati's Midnight Madness sales on payday Fridays, for example, have become so successful and so ingrained in the Metro Manilan psyche that many people have been known to alter their household budgets and personal schedules just so they could participate in a spending orgy passing itself off as a centavo-pinching outing.

Business executives, however, argue that by enticing people to spend, malls help the economy. "If it weren't for the malls, retail would be just as good as dead," insists the chain-store executive, who says his mall branches are doing four times better than his other shops. "There wouldn't be a Bench, there wouldn't be a Penshoppe. Malls help retail in a big way. Retail is keeping our economy afloat." He has a valid point, and those needing a clincher for this may want to look at Japan, where the legendary zeal of its citizens to save their money instead of spending it has practically guaranteed that nation's tanked economy will remain burbling feebly at the bottom for quite some time.

Still, the present mall-building fever is eliciting fears that too much of a "good" thing may be bad or, again, that Goliath could turn out to be really, truly evil. It hasn't helped that there is no parallel rush to build manufacturing facilities, which could have made the Philippines look less doomed to being a nation of mere consumers. (Mall developers may even be snapping up prime agricultural land as you read this.)

It also hasn't helped that malls themselves have been associated with all sorts of messes, ranging from poor waste management to traffic. In fairness, matters like traffic should be the responsibility of local governments, which, if they cannot be bothered to widen the roads, should at least consider strict enforcement of ordinances regarding where jeeps and buses can load and unload passengers. The consequences of doing neither can lead to hellish experiences in thoroughfares like the Alabang-Zapote Road, along which there are about six malls, including the people magnet called SM Southmall.

Landscape architect Paulo Alcazaren is among those who are shaking their heads over the malls and the havoc many of them are wreaking. "My belief," says Alcazaren, who helped design at least five malls in Singapore, "is that you can allow these things to go as far they are now, but even from the point of view of greed, even those whose motives are pecuniary, will have to look at better ways to do things."

As it is, Alcazaren says, malls are messing big time with our minds. Aside from manipulating mallgoers to purchase things, malls are said to promote "othering," or the notion of an "us versus them." Not everyone, after all, can enter a mall, which despite its pretensions of being a public place, very much remains a private space with its own set of special rules. For starters, it picks the people it allows in and keeps the riffraff out. As Alcazaren puts it, "You get filtered as soon as you walk in." Even malls targeting those from lower-income levels practice this, and for all the shopping centers there are right now and for all the millions they have entertained and will entertain, the truth is that millions of others will never be allowed to step foot inside them, simply because, to the mall operators and their security lackeys, they are not dressed right, do not smell right, or do not look right. Also unwelcome are those who strike the guards at the door as likely to indulge in inappropriate behavior, which would upset the malls' carefully calibrated environment.

That actually is another thing malls here and elsewhere have over the streets: the absence of social discomfort. In a 1998 paper discussing the new urban geography of Southeast Asian cities, scholars P.J. Rimmer and H.W. Dick write: "The attitude is reminiscent of 19th-century attitudes toward the threatening London crowd, which was regarded as being uneducated, uncouth, and unpredictable. The attitude of the middle class in south-east Asia towards the urban mass is also not so very different from that of the colonial Europeans to their indigenous subjects. A common language does not bridge the cultural gap or the economic divide."

Rimmer and Dick also observe that some commercial and residential real estate developers in Southeast Asia make it a point to hire foreign firms in planning their projects. Although they cite the experience of an Indonesian developer as an example, they may well be speaking of what is happening here in noting, "This heavy reliance on foreign expertise for both master planning and the design of individual elements leads to a social and cultural dissonance with the rest of the city.... In the (United States) the disintegration of the city is a recent, and to many people, an alarming phenomenon. In (Southeast Asia), it is familiar to anyone of the older generation. Formerly, it was the situation identified as colonialism; nowadays, the distinction is primarily one of wealth and status."

IN MANY ways, malls are poor approximations of the old town square. Unlike the modern mall, the plaza was accessible even to the great unwashed, who did not feel at all intimidated by the nearby presence of those who wielded social and political power. In colonial Philippines, the town square was surrounded by the church, the dwellings of the principalia and the ilustrado, and the municipio; the lowly indios lived farther away. But the plaza itself was open to anyone and everyone, allowing folks to share and enjoy a common space regardless of social stature, and for community spirit to develop. (Escolta, the legendary pre- and post-war shopping street of Manila, also catered mainly to the elite. But since it was a public street, even those who had nothing in their pockets did their paseo there and window-shopped.)

Try as the huge malls might to generate a similar sense of community among its chosen guests, they inevitably fail. To be sure, any relationship forged in a controlled environment is likely to remain artificial and transient. At the same time, such can be said to be a curse of the city, where rising concerns for personal safety make one more guarded and wary of others. More often than not, people who are strangers to one another when they enter a mall will remain so when they leave it, even if they had just come from a concert where they sang in unison and danced side by side.

A frequent mallgoer can sometimes succeed in making some sort of connection with the salespeople at a favorite store (the underlying motive being, of course, to score a discount). But most of such relationships tend to remain superficial; they are also bound to be cut short, given the high personnel turnover rate at mall stores.

"Shopping," says architect Augusto Villalon, "is a necessary activity." As malls continue to rise across the country in record, one can only wish it were not also an increasingly alienating one.