April 19, 2019
Although shopping malls are dying in the United States, Tehran is about to see the opening of one of the world’s largest malls. Called the Iran Mall, the first section is slated to open May 1.
When the project is completed by Now Ruz 2021, it will encompass 1.95 million square meters of commercial, cultural, parking and other space. It will even have some manufacturing areas, as traditional Persian bazaars house craftsmen.
It will also have 15 sports fields and 40 movie houses—12 of which will have more than 1,800 seats each.
This may surprise many who recall that Ayatollah Khomeini did not see the revolution of 1979 as the portal to commercialism, but the counter to commercialism and materialism.
The area the mall will cover comes to more than half the size of New York’s Central Park.
According to a tabulation on WikiPedia, it will be the largest mall in the world by total area, and the second largest measured by leasable commercial space. That compendium says the Iran Mall will have 650,000 square meters of gross leasable area, compared to 659,612 square meters at the South China Mall in Dongguan, China. But the South China Mall totals only 1.7 million square meters overall, making it about 12 percent smaller than thr Iran Mall.
For the shopping enthusiast, the Iran Mall will have 2,500 shops.
The largest shopping mall in North America is the West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta. It covers an area of 490,000 square meters, with 350,000 square meters of gross leasable area and more than 800 shops. It was conceived and built by three Iranian-born brothers.
The Iran Mall is located in northwest Tehran adjacent to the Hemmat Expressway and Chitgar Lake. It will house 200 restaurants, a five-star hotel and a gigantic supermarket called a hypermarket to be managed by the French Carrefour firm.
The mall has been under construction for six years thus far. It is but one of several megamalls in Iran, including the Esfahan City Center, the 11th largest mall by gross leasable area, and the Persian Gulf Complex in Shiraz, the 13th largest globally.
Many malls were started during the administration of President Mahmud Ahmadi-nejad (2005-13), when soaring oil revenues and lax regulation encouraged banks to lend widely if not wisely. The mall has not published a projected cost figure, but the Fars news agency last year said that by 2017 the main financier, Ayandeh Bank, had already put up 220 trillion rials ($7.6 billion at the official exchange rate at the time). Last month, the bank said it planned to sell off almost its entire stake in the mall.
