There's a very interesting video of the world's largest mall (twice the size of the Mall of America!) called the South China Mall. With retail square footage of 6.5 million square feet, it sits largely deserted, with a vacancy rate of 99.2%. Check out the documentary about it.

This was similar to my experience when I was in Beijing - I visited the very stylish (renovated) Qianmen Street, but found it was largely deserted of tenants (picture courtesy of Flickr). I thought the street had just opened, but Selina told me it was renovated for the summer Olympics... it was still largely deserted almost a year later! The only real store I could remember being there was the H&M... 

There's also a similar slideshow about the decline of Dubai...