China’s Enormous Derelict Shopping Mall Does Not Bode Well For Humanity’s Future

China’s Enormous Derelict Shopping Mall Does Not Bode Well For Humanity’s Future

China is known for building ambitious infrastructure projects, and finding humans to populate them after the fact. Sometimes, it doesn’t go according to plan. This is one of those times.

Meet the Pentagonal Mart, a gargantuan, $US200 million shopping complex inspired by the US Pentagon, which has the dubious honour of being the largest vacant building in Shanghai. According to the People’s Daily News, the 70-acre mall was completed in 2009 and remains virtually empty to this day, “mainly because of its location and confusing inner structures”. Hmm, minor planning details.

Only in small sections of the shopping mall/business centre/human maze will a person occasionally be spotted pushing a lonely shopping cart down an aisle lit by endless fluorescent lights. Canned foods and packaged goods gleam untouched on shelves; museum pieces in an exhibition of superfluous development that needs no signage to explain itself.

If modern society were to collapse under the weight of egregiously unsustainable resource consumption, our dystopian swan song would probably look something like this.

[People’s Daily News [Business Insider]]
Follow the author @themadstone

Top image via SPM Park


The Cheapest NBN 50 Plans

It’s the most popular NBN speed in Australia for a reason. Here are the cheapest plans available.

At Gizmodo, we independently select and write about stuff we love and think you'll like too. We have affiliate and advertising partnerships, which means we may collect a share of sales or other compensation from the links on this page. BTW – prices are accurate and items in stock at the time of posting.