story and photos by Algis Kalvaitis

If shopping is creating ever more complex globalized networks that rely on multi-tiered databases, daisy-chained electronic systems and silent nanosecond transactions, then there is nothing in the architecture of the Grove’s shopping complex that reflects this. It is a haven of staged urban bliss. Visit the Grove on Fairfax and Third in Los Angeles for details.

The Grove has an unabashed decorative appeal, the kind that makes Las Vegas irresistible. I admit with guilty pleasure that I like its unrepentant Junk Space atmosphere. Who can resist the polished veneer, the well-lit vitrines? Unfortunately, not only does it conceal the automated reality of modern business, it denies shoppers the real pleasures of shopping: the negotiations, the strategies, and the interactions.

In stark contrast to L.A.’s Grove, shopping in Central Asia is the kind of confusing, frightening, fascinating and triumphant experience that makes the Grove feel anesthetized. Attending the Green Bazaar in Almaty, Kazakhstan, is not a spectator sport. It is an assault on the senses and a test of reasoning, logic, debate and arithmetic. The venue allows for disbelief, disagreement and interaction—a stage like the Wall Street trading floor where buying and selling is anything but passive.

This form of shopping should not be dismissed as brute or offensive but rather a kind of rich social experience. Even if haggling over the price of tomatoes is futile, it is still a form of interaction. Dispute becomes a kind of social dialogue, not a reason for recrimination. The Grove removes the need for confrontation in shopping, making it a non-event, a pedestrian affair, another one of life’s banalities. Who is to blame? Technology, culture, or an architecture that fits just a little too tightly? Whatever the answer, the Green Bazaar offers what the Grove cannot or will not. The bazaar pushes life back into shopping and replaces the sterile mall atmosphere with living architecture.

When the Soviet Union fell, stability and central planning fell with it. But the Green Bazaar has never seemed like a place of rock-solid stability. There is something seedy about the place; a constant feeling that something is just about to happen. But Almaty’s Green Bazaar is not lawless like London’s infamous South Bank of hundreds of years ago, nor somnolent like Los Angeles’s Grove. It is a place where many locals shop for food, clothes and other goods, but it is also a social hub.

Progress or retreat? The Grove

The Green Bazaar is not far from the Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton boutiques brought here by the prospect of this country’s oil reserves. In Almaty, the former capital of Kazakhstan, the decadent pleasure of shopping stems more from the curiosity it peaks and the senses it heightens. Ironically, the pleasure that comes from buying material goods at the Grove in L.A. is surpassed at the bazaar by the simple experience of shopping there.

The Grove strives to be normal, not provocative. The Green Bazaar has no such mandate. The reigning question: is anyone in charge in this place? In the bazaar diversity flourishes and transforms. More than the unusual goods or customs, the people who frequent the bazaar—a cross between Kowloon Walled City and a traveling carnival—elevate the market into something worth experiencing.

Soon after entering the Green Bazaar from the north side, you may be offered a rice bag by the portly old Kazakh woman on the stool, but in the overwhelming confusion of this narrow entrance, you might overlook her. The entrance is the densest zone in the entire complex. Once inside, shoppers disperse down disparate corridors, but here there is pushing and purposefulness. The result is a human Venturi effect that dissipates as the space widens from cramped portal to open-air corridor lined with vendors. Greater density means increased frustration and friction, which results in lots of cussing in Russian. In this transition zone, where inside meets outside and consumers meet consumables, the frenzied activity foreshadows the frantic movement of the market.

Down the claustrophobic open-air corridor goods wait in ambush. Boxes of detergent create colorful, repetitious displays that serve as billboards as well as dividing walls. In front of the endless array of cooking oils, duck past the sausage vendor. Sunlight laden with dust rolls down the staircase ahead, but head right past the catch of the day to reach the best salads in Central Asia. Here, five Korean women sell salads of carrot and glass noodles. Their business is steady. The same large heaps of carrot salad appear each day at their stands. They are always eager to offer a taste. A large woman awakes from a daze, rises from her chair and lifts a tangled heap of opaque noodles with chopsticks. With the other hand she beckons and smiles, revealing a full set of gold teeth.

Their space is clearly defined by the wooden stalls. Even though the Salad Women compete for customers each guards her own territory, bounded by the walls of her stall. Their prices are similarly fixed and disputing the cost of salad would be insulting. This is the tacit agreement as soon as their tofu or black mushrooms are sampled. Nothing is free. Sample all the salads, but don’t try to negotiate the price. Within the fabric of the bazaar, their position is uncontested—a sharp contrast to the panhandlers who wander the aisles.

Unlike the polished and groomed space of the Grove, the Green Bazaar’s borders are open to people who are neither consumers nor sellers. Panhandlers exist in a state of semi-visibility, helped by some and shunned by others. They make the market a mimetic alternative to the city of Almaty. Most of the market is concentrated under the skeleton of an old factory, but the invisible border of the market spreads beyond the boundaries of the edifice and absorbs parts of the sidewalk. A variety of products attest to the incoming current of foreign goods. Arranged in neat rows along a wide staircase leading to the vegetable vendors, shoes of all shapes and sizes create a wall bearing the words, “Made in China.”

Like mother like daughter; vendors in the bazaar

Although the ancient route of the Silk Road never ran through Almaty, modern day China provides its neighbor heaps of inexpensive consumer goods. Catacombs of flip-flops are stacked to the ceiling. Like the detergent sellers at the entrance, the shoe sellers define their boundaries with their goods. Their environment is not fixed, but continually shifts based on supply and demand. The greater the demand, the sooner the stock of shoes is depleted. Lack of sales, on the other hand creates a surplus inventory that requires more space—and results in thicker walls. Back in L.A., at the Grove, goods and infrastructure are separate. Bricks and mortar, unlike flip-flop walls, do not gauge the health of business.

One floor below the main market is a wide, open-air alley that leads to a dead-end. Here, shoppers walk down the middle and observe the wares to either side: carpets laden with pieces of parts that could be useful to someone somewhere. Each vendor sells a parade of mismatched items that are neatly organized in rows, ready for purchase. Each carpet reveals a time capsule of wares. Watches come from different time periods and from across political spectrums. Fake Rolexes sit by their Soviet-made counterparts. Nothing looks new. A thin patina of dust and time covers all. The vendors deal in an antiquated currency of nostalgia.

Putty & paint crowd a path

The only thing protecting these vendors from passing summer rains are poorly made rice bag covers. The winds tearing at the haplessly tied rice cloth gives the impression that you are at sea—that the sails have torn loose and you are adrift. Summer storms gather formidable force as they travel along the barren steppe. Almaty faces desolate grassland and is regularly hit with dust storms from which the only recourse is to shield your eyes until they pass. The entire market shakes and shudders from the wind.

Do not ask the flower vendors if the flowers are fresh. They will eye you incredulously and stare as if to ask, “Was Vladimir Ilyich a Communist?” But Communism has faded. Lenin and Communist memorabilia are now more the fabric of legend than of the vernacular. The faded medals and posters of the former Communist regime, venerating hard work and proletariat dedication, are now kitsch buys for foreigners. But the subject, and the memory of oppression, is still too close for the Kazakhs to see the irony in the bright yellow posters urging farmers to collectivize.

The final resting place of Soviet medals—if not proudly displayed on the lapel of a septuagenarian’s dark polyester blazer—is in the market stall of a bespectacled, bearded man who wears a dark green jacket the color of army fatigues.

The seller of Soviet symbols is firmly entrenched near the shoe mongers. His booth is on one of the main thoroughfares that bisect the market city like a scimitar. He is somber and seemingly unaffected by the commotion of the market all around him. Medals that were once awarded for merit are now sold for a price. His stories are surely more interesting than the goods he sells.

When the roof leaks, head for the high ground

Both the Grove and Green Bazaar are vehicles for getting goods to customers. But the Grove lacks something that is integral to the Bazaar shopping experience. The Bazaar is a product of necessity while the Grove is a product of desire. In Almaty, shopping is not only about decoration, it is about interaction between the vendor and the buyer.

In Los Angeles, shopping is sterile. Shopping at the Grove is reduced to credit card transactions or brief questions asked of store staff. The entire experience could be replaced with on-line shopping. The culture of the Bazaar reveals while the Grove strives to conceal; it strips away human interaction, replaces vibrant sounds and smells with air-conditioning and synthetic perfume, it lulls and deadens the senses. The Bazaar, set in a faraway land, would be uncomfortable, unreal to the average Grove shopper. It is what customers have forgotten, what they have been inoculated against and what they may never have experienced at all.

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Author Algis Kalvaitis is pursuing masters degrees in architecture and urban planning at the University of California, Los Angeles. He writes occasionally for Inversion while surfing, stressing and building intricate cardboard dioramas of the Smurf Village. Visit his Web site at: www.bol.ucla.edu/~akalva/



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