The complex of half a million square meters has been projected next to the Everglades nature reserve.
Miami, city of multiple large shopping centers, redoubles the bet and prepares to erect the mall of all mall: the Miami American Dream, its greatest temple of consumption. Miami-Dade County approved in May the project to raise in the vicinity of the Everglades, a delicate natural paradise, a cyclopean infrastructure of more than half a million square meters, with countless shops and at the same time amusement park, which if it overcomes the planning and financial challenges involved and is carried out will become the largest shopping center in U.S.
In the midst of a major shopping mall crisis due to the boom in internet commerce – at least 300 of the 1,100 in the next five years are expected to close AMERICA–, the bet of the American Dream follows in the footsteps of the Dubai Mall in the hybridization of commercial surface with theme park. About half of the space would be for about 1,400 shops and the rest for a hotel of 2,000 rooms and entertainments such as an underwater lake, a water park, a permanent function of the Cirque du Soleil or a ski slope with the height of a 16-story building for which they would be produced, in the always torrid south of Florida, tons of artificial snow. The project, whose cost would exceed 4,000 million dollars, has no execution date, but as soon it would not be ready until well into the next decade.
The municipal session in which the plan was approved lasted nine hours of dialectical combat between its supporters, who see it as an opportunity to create thousands of jobs and attract more tourism to the region, and its detractors who warn of its ecological and urban risks and the possible waste of public money; among them, a 12-year-old girl named Megan Sorbo famous since she was only 10 years old and took the lead in the fight against the hunting of the American bear. Florida: “This mall is not an American dream but an American abomination,” he told adults with a chest sticker that read the word “Nightmare” in English.
Nine county commissioners voted in favor of the project and only one against, Daniella Levin Cava. As he explained to EL PAÍS, he is against it because it will further increase the traffic problems suffered by the six million inhabitants of the metropolitan area – it is estimated that the shopping center generates a daily bustle of 70,000 vehicles; Because 60% of the 14,000 jobs the company says it will create will be less than $25,000 a year – half the average in USA–; and for posing a threat to the environment due to the huge amount of drinking water that it will require next to a unique wetland in the world that urgently needs to stop the contamination of its water sources. “I find it ridiculous to think that the American dream is to go to a place with a lot of shops and where you can ski when Florida is a place with so much natural beauty and fun options,” he said. The Miami Herald in an editorial presented the project as “tempting” but “threatening” and left hanging a question for the future: “Will we end up regretting?”
Behind the plan of the Megamall of Miami there is the Canadian company Triple Five, specialized in large commercial developments and with precedents such as the Mall of America near Minneapolis, the largest of AMERICA to date, or the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta (Canada), the largest in all of North America. The firm is already developing a somewhat smaller twin American Dream in New Jersey and expects to have it ready in 2019 with varieties such as a Shrek swamp designed in collaboration with Dreamworks, a giant indoor Ferris wheel and a Legoland.
Triple Five is the company of the Ghermezians, a family of Iranian Jewish emigrants with a fortune estimated at more than two billion euros. His vision for commercial areas goes back a century to the late patriarch Jacob Ghermezian, who had a huge bazaar in Samarkand (Uzbekistan) until after the Russian Revolution he fled to save his heritage and resumed the task in Tehran, where he became a real estate tycoon of the time and built the shopping complex, apartments, offices and largest leisure in the capital of Iran. In the sixties he took his family from there again due to political turbulence and went to Canada, where he spent less than 20 years importing Persian carpets to building in 1981 the mall of Alberta already with the delirious Ghermezian seal: a lake with a pirate ship, a copy of the famous Bourbon Street in New Orleans and caged lions and tigers. In 1992 they added the Minneapolis mall after convincing the local authorities to lend their shoulders to finance it: “Do we bring you the moon and you are going to tell us no?” asked Nader, one of Jacob’s sons, in a phase of doubts. At the opening ceremony, Ray Charles sang the patriotic America the Beautiful.
Since then the Ghermezians seek to hit a new historical blow in the mall sector by building their definitive Fantasyland, as years ago they defined their ideal of shopping center until Disney put them a lawsuit. They tried and failed, for example, in Niagara Falls and Las Vegas. And they returned to the charge with New Jersey, which embraced the proposal of the Ghermezians to inject illusion after a crash of 2008 that left the state in dust. The project is going ahead but critics say the $200 million budgeted at the start has increased fivefold. The suspicion that the Ghermezians are skilled fund milkers also hangs over Operation Miami. They, in turn, assure that they will carry out the project and promise more than 30 million annual visitors, ten million more than the world-famous Disney Magic Kingdom in Orlando, about four hours drive north.
The Ghermezians argue that their model of shops and sumptuous attractions is the only way for supermarkets to survive in the online age. The “supraregional mall” or “lifestyle centers”, as they are categorized, is a new habitat of consumption and life that US scholars already take for granted. “Malls are no longer just places to shop and projects like this also aim to go beyond the theme park,” David Smiley, professor of urban design at Columbia University, responds by email. “These proposals approach in a strange way past utopias, a mixture of fantasy and nightmare, of architects, planners, philosophers, freaks, eccentrics, investors, kings and oligarchs. It is the dream of a single space that encompasses all social life with the full cooperation of individuals.”