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After my piece in the last edition on the Jubilee House, I'm afraid I'm not done yet with buildings and cities... The Accra Mall in the national capital is arguably the most popular place in the city. Built only in the last three or 4 years, it is attracting huge numbers of visitors daily and the numbers keep on growing. I can tell you why: A feeling of "abrokyire". For those who have lived or travelled to any of the mid to high income countries of the world, shopping malls are a familiar part of the economic landscape and so they feel a kind of reconnection. For those who haven't, well it is the closest they can get to the lands of their dreams. Malls are at once shopping venues and at the same time, socializing joints. You have nice well kept shops, cinemas, restaurants and an ambience - a friendly welcoming ambience - a place you can feel a part of the mass culture of consumerism, even if your pockets are not exactly bulging with the lucre to match! But malls also add up to a town's or city's public buildings culture. Some malls sprawl and do not have a distinct look, others have imposing facades and grand entrances. With two main entrances, The Accra Mall is somewhere in between, but since it seems, it is still under construction, we can't quite tell how the final look would be until it is completed. Ghanaians love a good thing and the love affair with the Accra Mall shows that between price and value, they will settle on value. But there are some amongst us who would grouse over price and in the end sacrifice value. Great cities - the cities that behave like human beings - they all price value over price. Does that sound right? London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo and the others all have that kind of mindset and keep regenerating and reengineering constantly. In London, they just revamped one of the most popular parts of the city: the busy intersection between Oxford Street and Regents Street. It is a place I and millions of others have crisscrossed several times. Just last week, they came up with a solution they borrowed from a Japanese city to ease human and vehicular traffic. It was as simple as it was imaginative: diagonal crossing! And it cost the city authorities five million pounds sterling. And that's it. Oh yes, the old intersection could have been left as it was and five million pounds would not have been spent but where would that have left Londoners and the thousands of tourists that throng the place daily? It would of course have been another classic example of knowing the cost but not the value. In Ghana, that's what seems to be killing not just our cities, but our instincts of creativity, innovation and aesthetics in our national economic planning, management and execution. Accra, our national capital, after 52 years of independence, is an unruly clump of buildings, gradually being swamped by ugly kiosks and other "illegal structures". "Decongestion exercises" have been instituted in some of our city centres and hopefully these would be extended to other parts outside the city centres and sustained until our urban centres can learn the discipline of modern cities and start creating resident/visitor-friendly areas, spaces and places. It was the new intersection at Oxford Street in London that so intrigued me that I took my camera to the place and a few other places around city, all the while thinking of our own Oxford Street in Accra... Is it possible they can make it a one way traffic area to enhance its accessibility, or at least introduce some elements to revamp it? Maybe something along the Lines of New York's Time Square's LUTS? But all of that costs money and any innovator who would attempt it will either be accused of "wasting money" when there are "more important things" or at the top of the crime pyramid, "causing financial loss to the state" - a very terrifying thought... But we must innovate, we must spend money - we may even in the process cause financial loss to the state - but it is something we must do if we want to transform our surroundings to make them as attractive as all the "advanced countries" that we so admire... PS: I think it was a poster L saw that somewhere in the London Underground