The BurJuman Shopping Centre

The BurJuman Shopping Centre.
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I grew up in Hong Kong, and when I left in 1997 it wasn’t for fear of the Big Red Reaper, who was apparently stropping his claws just north of Fan Ling Golf Club. The fact was I’d been working there for six years and felt it was time to experiment with pastures new.

I felt Hong Kong was small and I wanted to try a city where things were big. A mature city. I heard London calling. Or maybe New York. It was almost secondary where.

The main thing was to go to a ‘real’ city. So off I trotted, into one of the most difficult and exhausting periods of my life. I simply couldn’t come to terms with London and, infuriatingly, I couldn’t even understand why.

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Then, on a miserable February evening in a St. James’ pub, an old Hong Kong chum quietly provided my Eureka moment. “London is just too big,” he said, wearily rubbing his eyes. “I can’t seem to fit it all inside my head.

In Hong Kong, I know where everything is, why it’s there, and how to get to it,” he lamented. “It has all the variety, excitement, history and culture you could want, and it’s all so accessible. In London it’s spread out over 700 square miles of what’s mostly urban sprawl!”

Within a month of that conversation I was here in Dubai, happily able to fit my new city ‘inside my head’.

I wasn’t overwhelmed by the scale of it and I could feel my way around it. I could get from one side of it to the other in half an hour, and yet it still had that buzz and excitement that I loved about Hong Kong. I liked it.

I still do. And I had learned a valuable lesson: that bigger is not necessarily better.

So, what’s the point? Well, I think it’s a story that has some resonance in Dubai when it comes to our obsessive proliferation of shopping malls.

Let’s start by looking at the latest, the greatest, the granddaddy of them all: the iconic Dubai Mall.

In a game of ‘Shopping Mall Top Trumps’ this monster would Ace everything. Usable space? 12 million ft². Highest point? 2,300ft. Retail outlets? 1,200. Special feature? Largest indoor aquarium in the world… and so it goes. It’s incredible and, what’s more, it even looks great.