Uncover the biggest malls in the world

Depending on what you want to see when you travel, you might or might not enjoy visiting malls when visiting abroad. Nevertheless, if you want to truly discover how people live in other countries, you may want to look into their everyday routine, and shopping malls are part of it. In Europe, such structures and their building process are controlled by many instances : the state, the local governments and the people themselves sometimes, which makes it hard to produce malls that are too massive.

In other countries, where these matters are completely unregulated, you can witness the rise of humongous shopping malls which are truly impressive not only by their size, but also by their layout and decoration.
In order to prove the point,  here is a list of the greatest shopping malls in the world: enjoy!

The SM City North EDSA

The first venue is the SM City North EDSA in Quezon, Philippines.

The beginnings of the SM City North were a bit uncertain. The land on which it was built (40 acres by the way) was composed only of marshes, which made the construction process quite hard. Furthermore, a political crisis leading to a steep rise in interest rates almost resulted to a cancelation of the project. Nevertheless, after years of struggle, the SM City North EDSA was given birth to.

The center is so huge it contains no less than 9 sub-structures :

• The main building : in which you can find a department center and an IMAX movie theatre

• The interior zone (Annex 1) : which is now a parking lot

• The Annex 2, 3 and 4 : which are extensions of the original main building

• The sky garden : An artificial garden with waterfalls and rivers

• The warehouse : containing the super sale club and another parking lot

• The Grass residences : with hotel rooms

• The SM Cyber West avenue

With a total of 498 000 square meters, it is the largest mall in all the Philippines.

NB : It is not the case for the SM city north, but usually huge malls offer the possibility to make a virtual visit, which can be a good thing to do before heading out and exploring. Companies like visiglobe provide this kind of Mall Navigation App.

 

The Golden Resources Mall

This Chinese mall is indeed one of the largest of the country. However it is surely not one of the most successful. Located outside the fourth ring road, it is exceptionally expensive for Chinese people and quite hard to get to. It was in fact conceived to suit the needs of foreign tourists but has had very few visits from any foreigners since its creation. The presence of western franchises such as Papa John's or Ralph Lauren illustrates well the fact that this was actually not a place built for the Chinese working class. Talks of a train station being built near the mall are being held, which would make the venue more practical for international tourists.

The overall surface reaches up to 557 419 square meters

 

The great Mall of China

Great is only a figure of speech in this case! It is quite astonishing to imagine that the largest mall in the world is actually … a Ghost Mall. With a little more than 900 000 square meters, the Great Mall of China seem to be of little interest to the people of Dongguan, mainly workers, that were hit by a recent recession. The mall in itself is simply enormous: divided into many section, each corresponding to a city in the world, it still fails to attract the Chinese people of Dongguan.

It is quite easy to understand, since 99% of its leasable spaces are empty. Apparently, this project was conceived with unreasonable expectations and easy financing (a usual drawback with financially unregulated economies) which explains its tremendous size and unpopularity.