China’s clever plan to save its dying shopping malls
On a recent research trip to China, I wandered through the Oasis Mall in suburban Shanghai. Like many Chinese shopping centers, this complex was filled with empty stores that reflected the end of China’s 30-year-long economic expansion. But there were surprises as well.To get more news about china shanghai shopping mall, you can visit meet-in-shanghai.net official website.
Along a stretch of the mall’s interior walkway, a cluster of parents and grandparents sat on chairs. They were looking through a plate glass window, watching a dozen 5- to 7-year-old girls practice ballet steps, carefully following their teacher’s choreography. A space initially designed for retail had been turned into a dance studio.
From 1990 through 2020, large, shiny shopping malls embodied China’s spectacular economic growth. They sprouted in cities large and small to meet consumer demand from an emerging middle class that was keen to express its newfound affluence. These centers look familiar to American eyes, which isn’t surprising: U.S. architectural firms built 170 malls in China during this period.
Like their U.S. counterparts, many Chinese malls have fallen on hard times. The COVID-19 pandemic and the rise of online shopping have devastated foot traffic, leaving the nation with a huge overhang of retail space. But many Chinese malls are being reimagined by owners and users as palaces of experience—civic areas for communities to meet and interact, with new configurations of public and private space.
As a longtime urban policy scholar, I was fascinated by the new uses I saw for malls in China. In my view, these experiments could become models for new, creative uses of retail space in the U.S., where the mall was invented.
SERVING A NEW CONSUMER CLASS
China opened up to foreign trade and investment less than 50 years ago. Since then, it has become the world’s second-largest economy, surpassed only by the U.S.
Rising incomes and a massive population shift from rural areas to cities have created a growing middle class with significant purchasing power. Gross domestic product per capita increased from $293 in 1985 to $12,500 by 2021.
Today, approximately 350 million Chinese—25% of the total population—can be considered middle class. More recent economic growth has generated growing income inequality that now is equivalent to U.S. levels.
Malls became a motif of modernity during the country’s economic expansion. They offered consumers year-round protection from heat, humidity, cold, and frost, as well as from busy streets and polluting traffic. Malls were safe environments where the steadily increasing numbers of more affluent Chinese families could shop and eat, stroll and meet.
Over the past 30 years, China’s malls have faced economic booms and slumps. For example, the New South China Mall in Dongguan—which is twice the size of Minnesota’s Mall of America, its largest U.S. counterpart—opened in 2005. But most of its 2,300 storefronts remained closed for more than a decade as China fought off recession after the 2008 world financial crisis.
