World’s Most Expensive Shopping Mall

In the US, we think of shopping malls as places for teenagers to hang out and purchase things for more than they’d cost just about anywhere else, places to get our holiday shopping done and places to walk in comfort for exercise. Will the same be true of the most expensive shopping mall in the world? Only time will tell.

The Bawadi mall, part of the Bawadi project in Dubailand, Dubai, will be the world’s most expensive shopping mall—if it’s ever completed. The original plans called for the 4-million-square-foot mall to be finished in 2012 for $2.7 billion, although construction on the Bawadi project was, at the very least, slowed by the 2008 financial crisis.

If completed, the Bawadi mall will be more expensive than the US $1.3 billion, 9.58-million-square-foot New South China Mall in Dongguan, China, and larger than the 12.1-million-square-foot Dubai Mall, part of Dubai’s $20 billion Burj Khalifa complex.