Dubai aims to build world’s largest shopping mall before Expo 2020

Mall of the World will have climate-controlled interior, over 20,000 hotel rooms, buildings and its own transit system

The Mall of the World will be completed before Dubai hosts the Expo 2020 exhibition, making it the world’s largest mall in the first domed city in the world that will also have the largest indoor theme park in the world, according to Developer Dubai Holdings.

"We are making good progress with the planning and thoughtful approach to the development of Mall of the World," Dubai Holding COO Morgan Parker said in an email statement to Tech Insider. "It sits at the heart of Dubai and will be critical to the Emirate's economic growth."



In addition to being entirely glass-domed, the city will have climate-controlled interior, over 20,000 hotel rooms, hundreds of buildings and its own transit system.

More than 100 specialists including designers, engineers, and architects are involved on the project that will be boasting a network of 33 roads and 1.6 million square feet of walkways and plazas, bike routes, bus lines, and even gondola rides on the mall's artificial waterways, across the 48 million square feet space.

Dubai Holding says the Mall of the World will consist of five main elements: retail, residential, office, hospitality and entertainment. These will make up nearly 300 individual buildings in the city across 8 million square feet. The company expects to see 180 million visitors annually once it opens to the public.

However, many are sceptic over the success of this project. Even with hyper-purified climate, building and sustaining a domed city will be challenging. It will require an immense amount of time-intensive labour and upkeep — if it ever reaches the construction stage.

As Motherboard's Brian Merchant observed a couple years ago, “A city's need to keep everything contained inside what's essentially a giant bubble means something else is implicitly being left out.”

Dubai to press ahead with world's largest mall as Gulf economy slows

On Tuesday, Dubai said it would press ahead with plans to build the world’s largest shopping mall despite an economic slowdown looming in the region, but would assess market demand before proceeding with the project’s later stages.



Oil makes little direct contribution to Dubai’s economy, but its drop has dampened consumer and investor confidence in the Gulf’s financial and tourist hub as neighbouring governments slash subsidies and economists cut growth forecasts.

"We will be reacting to the demands of the market. The project is massive and complex and will have to be built in stages," said Ahmad bin Byat, vice-chairman and managing director of Dubai Holding, a company owned by the emirate’s ruler that is responsible for the project.

Plans for the remainder "will be dependent on market dynamics", Byat told a news conference, saying the project would be funded through an equal split of his company's internal resources, institutional investors and debt.

He estimated the total bill would be nearly Dhs80 billion dirhams ($22 billion) and that Dubai Holding would provide "just shy" of 30 billion dirhams.

"We're talking to advisers, financial investors, sovereign funds, many people,” Byat said, adding, "We have a lot of understandings with quite a few people. This is a mixed-use project which will be very interesting not only to locals but for the global market to invest in."

Having become world famous for its lavish real estate developments, Dubai was badly hit by the global financial crisis in 2009 and was forced to shelve or cancel scores of projects.

However, it did not take long for investors to return and the emirate, one of seven in the United Arab Emirates Federation, has resumed its ambitious plans.

 

This article originally appeared on Tech Insider.