Sunday May 29, 2005

The Great Malls of China

peakoil.com -> nytimes.com :

DONGGUAN, China - After construction workers finish plastering a replica of the Arc de Triomphe and buffing the imitation streets of Hollywood, Paris and Amsterdam, a giant new shopping theme park here will proclaim itself the world's largest shopping mall [with 7 million square feet floor area].

The South China Mall - a jumble of Disneyland and Las Vegas, a shoppers' version of paradise and hell all wrapped in one - will be nearly three times the size of the massive Mall of America in Minnesota. It is part of yet another astonishing new consequence of the quarter-century economic boom here: the great malls of China.

... already, four shopping malls in China are larger than the Mall of America. Two, including the South China Mall, are bigger than the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, which just surrendered its status as the world's largest to an enormous retail center in Beijing. And by 2010, China is expected to be home to at least 7 of the world's 10 largest malls.

Chinese are swarming into malls, which usually have many levels that rise up rather than out in the sprawling two-level style typical in much of the United States. Chinese consumers arrive by bus and train, and growing numbers are driving there. On busy days, one mall in the southern city of Guangzhou attracts about 600,000 shoppers.

For the moment, the world's biggest mall is the six-million-square-foot Golden Resources Mall, which opened last October in northwestern Beijing. It has already sparked envy and competitive ambition among the world's big mall builders, who outwardly scoff at the Chinese ascent to mall-dom, even as they plot their own path to build on such scale in China.

How big is six million square feet? That mall, which is expected to cost $1.3 billion when completed, spans the length of six football fields and easily exceeds the floor space of the Pentagon, which at 3.7 million square feet is the world's largest office building. It is a single, colossal five-story building - with rows and rows of shops stacked on top of more rows and rows of shops - so large that it is hard to navigate among the 1,000 stores and the thousands of shoppers.

... and at a time when the biggest malls under construction in the United States measure about a million square feet, developers here are creating malls that are six, seven and eight million square feet.

In Dongguan, the developers of the South China Mall say they traveled around the world for two years in search of the right model. The result is a $400 million fantasy land: 150 acres of palm-tree-lined shopping plazas, theme parks, hotels, water fountains, pyramids, bridges and giant windmills. Trying to exceed even some of the over-the-top casino extravaganzas in Las Vegas, it has a 1.3-mile artificial river circling the complex, which includes districts modeled on the world's seven "famous water cities," and an 85-foot replica of the Arc de Triomphe.

- More monuments to cheap energy (getting not so cheap as time goes by).

(2005-05-29 13:26:41 SGT) [Biz] Permalink

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