Thanks Marilyn Terrell for the link to BLDGBlog. I’ve been lost there for the last hour and a half. Check out this post on mapping sci-fi locations in Google Maps: http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2008/03/google-maps-of-sci-fi.html

Very frightening.

I wouldn’t be surprised to see an article not unlike this one, although about a massively larger-scale disaster, when whole neighborhoods of Dubai go bust in a few years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summit_Place_Mall

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jpgnexus/sets/72157603967253675/

But yeah, shopping malls even here in America have been dropping like flies the past decade or so. And the ones that do remain are all starting to look the same. No unique character from one to the other anymore. I miss old malls. And abandoned ones are downright spooky!

I’d say there’s no irony about it. The piece talks quite a bit about the mall-building boom in the UAE, and I suspect there’s a very good reason a publication in the UAE decided to look at the world’s biggest mall.

It had been opened as an “upscale mall” with the world’s first Versace store, fur stores, jewelers, an FAO Schwartz, a Ritz Carlton Hotel, and so on, but they never quite got the attention they needed. First, they opened right at the beginning to Bush H’s recession, and second, the kinds of people who go these stores never want to go to a mall.

I worked at a furniture store there, and we lost over $150k/year due to low revenue (as in $150k below making it even). Often DAYS would go by where I saw nobody. To my right were 4 store spaces that had never been opened. To my left was the Franklin Mint and then about 3 spaces with no stores. It was as lonely as being a hermit. I had trouble finding employees because nobody ever came by to see a “Help wanted” sign, and I couldn’t afford to pay well, either.

The loneliness was brutal. Sometimes I would daydream, doodle, or just stare off into space. When people came by, it was being jarred suddenly. A customer? A CUSTOMER? Oh, no… “just looking…”

And the mall, being upscale, was cleaned frequently to steal as much look of decay as it could. The empty spaces were drywalled up, and a cheap trump l’oeil that gave an illusion of an intentional wall with a potted plant, marble column, or another hallway were painted on them. Subtle, “Space for lease” signs dotted the walls in tasteful moderation. The mall employed store spies to make sure no one opened late, no one was asleep in their stores, and that your store, no matter what you sold, was clean and neat.

The rented the space out to Hollywood a few times, and films like “First Son” were filmed in part there. They also held various events to try and let people know that there was more to the mall that Macy’s, but they always held them on the lowest floor with the highest occupation, and since I was on the top floor, all i could hear was the echoing of distant people like some special effect they had from drug trips in 1970s movies.

I got out of there after a year, and eventually the mall did get management that filled it up. I was there again last year after an 11 year absence, and it was a boring mall, but had about 90% occupancy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/timnliz/285657320/in/photostream/

plenty more photos online if you search google or flickr for ‘South China Mall Dongguan’

http://www.southchinamall.com.cn/english/attractions/travel.jsp?catid=94,102,169

But Splendid China doesn’t count because it was in the US, you say? Not so. These unfinished or failed projects are examples of governments attempting to force the invisible hand of the market. The governments decide they want a hotel, they decide they want an amusement park, they decide they want a gigantic shopping mall. They don’t check to see first whether it is actually going to be successful. I think this is the root cause of this common factor among large communist nations.

what, no cameras allowed in china? :(