Much of Parklane Shopping Mall, one of the 80 strata-titled malls in Singapore, remains unchanged. The mall is well-documented and getting individual owners to agree on issues ranging from collective sales to maintenance is pretty much seen as an impossible task. A lack of vision, a lack of coordination, and a lack of collective effort, perhaps these are the reasons why Parklane has remained as a rundown mall in need of a facelift for the past two to three decades.

 

Parklane was not always a ghost town though. In its glorious days, Parklane was a bustling mall filled with people and a place where many had fond memories of. It was when the mall started to house nightclubs and massage parlours did its reputation and fate started to change once and for all. With these night activities altering the face of Parklane, the crowd numbers started to dwindle and many shops found themselves struggling to survive.

 

What now stands inside Parklane is a hodgepodge of retailers, ranging from clinics to guitar shops to diving equipment shops and many others. A closer look and one would realise that the conglomeration of shops filling the space of Parklane are either long-standing and well-established enterprises with their own regular customers, or fairly new businesses that have decided to take on the challenge of overcoming Parklane.

 

Change is a word that cannot be found in many of the shop owners’ dictionaries. They have accepted the fate of Parklane and resigned to the fact that their shops exist in their own world. For these businesses, the mall is merely a space for them to do their business. And for those that are still hoping for change, they are probably the change that the mall has seen in recent years.