Shortly after we arrived, someone gave us vouchers for a nearby coffee shop. It’s inside the lobby of an apartment building, sharing this small space with the apartment complex’s reception desk and a florist’s shop. These entities are separately staffed, presumably separately owned, visited by different groups of people, and open and close at different times, but there is no barrier to movement between them.
Next door to this happy collection is a noodle bar. Walk in and stop and you can order noodles. Walk in and keep going, and you find that it doubles as a corridor into a shopping mall (the improbably named “Pengrunda Global Clothing Trading Plaza”).
Pengrunda is a vast concrete construction of several stories and considerable girth, from which rises a half-dozen apartment towers, including the one discussed above and the one in which we live. Leaving our apartment, I can take the lift to floor 3, and here exit the building onto a cyclopean landscape of stone, concrete, and small trees, with the immensity of the towers weighing down upon all. This is the roof of the mall, which is laid out as a huge stone garden, white and gleaming and spotless, and invariably empty. Our apartment staff call it the sky garden. The first time I crossed it, I felt I had strayed into Shadow of the Colossus or The Last Guardian, alone under the sun in a stone space meant for hundreds.
Walking across this alien field, up two flights of steps, and under a pagoda, I can enter the top floor of Pengrunda. On the right is a buffet function space full of tables and chairs. It is usually dark and empty – but it is not enclosed. Anyone could wander into it – but no one does. A hundred paces further on, I reach our local gym. There are no doors. Go a different way, and I can descend into the mall. Anyone wanting to come the other way, can. You can enter the mall from the street, climb through the floors, walk onto the sky garden, and access the strange liminal space of the buffet-adjacent corridor (though apparently no-one does). Where are the edges? Who is the sky garden for? The occupants of the apartments? Shoppers in the mall? Anyone who wants to wander up there? Does it matter?
This phenomenon is everywhere. Shops segue into common areas and staircases. Furniture sits in the streets. The office of a real estate company near us becomes a fruit shop by night. I hadn’t realised how precisely most spaces are delineated in the UK before encountering this contrast, and I haven’t travelled enough to know which is more normal.