Influx

The National has an amazing story about the South China Mall.

It was planned to be the world’s largest and it now sits under-used (planned to house 1,500 stores and currently has just 12), the victim of a dream that failed to materialize.

Many speculators had big plans for China and wanted to capitalize on the supposed massive growth of the new middle class. Sadly, this growth didn’t happen fast enough to propel this new mall to greatness.

It’s perhaps a lesson that shows just how easy it is to get carried away with projections of potential and suggests that China’s amazing growth can continue for ever.

“On a recent Friday afternoon, an amusement-park employee, slouched
in a forsaken ticket booth, tried to kill time by making origami.
Another worker slept, with perfect impunity, on a table. In front of
the haunted house attraction, one attendant was doing hand-stands while
two others looked blankly on.

There was nothing else to do,
because the South China Mall, which opened with great fanfare in 2005,
is not just the world’s largest. With fewer than a dozen stores
scattered through a space designed to house 1,500, it is also the
world’s emptiest – a dusty, decrepit complex of buildings marked by
peeling paint, dead light bulbs, and dismembered mannequins.

“They
set out to be the biggest, and hoped that being the biggest would be
the attracting factor,” says David Hand, a retail analyst at Jones Lang
LaSalle in Beijing, who has followed the project. “It hasn’t delivered.”

The
world has plenty of empty malls; there’s even an American website,
deadmalls.com, where connoisseurs of desolation post photos and
reminiscences of the once-great, now-gutted places where they spent the
Saturday afternoons of their youth. What sets the South China Mall
apart from the rest, besides its mind-numbing size, is that it never
went into decline. The tenants didn’t jump ship; they never even came
on board. The mall entered the world pre-ruined, as if its developers
had deliberately created an attraction for people with a taste for
abandonment and decay. It is a spectacular real-estate failure – but it
is also, as I saw when I spent two days exploring the site in May, a
strangely beautiful monument to the big dreams that China inspires.”

It’s a strange coincidence that the story appears in a Dubai based publication- a country that has pushed development to the limits in the hope of becoming THE new tourist destination.

This story came from the amazing BLDGB blog, who has its own post on this incredible story.

Posted by Ed Cotton