DUBAI SQUARE Retail Leasing Briefing

01 · The scheme

The Development

What Emaar has put on the public record about the building, its districts and the systems a tenant would trade inside — and how much of it dates from 2018.

Ownership & scale

One landlord, not two

Dubai Square launched in 2018 as a joint venture between Emaar Properties and Dubai Holding. That structure no longer applies: Emaar acquired Dubai Holding’s stake in Dubai Creek Harbour in 2022, in a transaction valued at AED 7.5 billion, and the December 2025 relaunch names Emaar alone. Much of the secondary coverage still describes a live JV — it is out of date.

For a prospective tenant that simplifies things: one counterparty, with an operating track record across The Dubai Mall and Dubai Hills Mall. Emaar has stated it manages over 100 million visitors a year and more than 1,500 retailers across fifteen years of operating experience.

On scale, be precise about which number you are using. The December 2025 statement confirms 2.6 million m² of retail, hospitality and commercial space across the district. The often-quoted 750,000 m² across three levels comes from the 2018 launch and describes gross retail floor space — not gross leasable area, which Emaar has never published for this scheme.

Sources: Emaar press release, 5 December 2025; Emaar press release, February 2024; Dubai Holding & Emaar joint release, July 2018; Dubai Holding statement on the Dubai Creek Harbour acquisition, 2022.

SpecificationFigure
Total district area (Dec 2025)2.6M m²
Gross retail floor space (2018)750,000 m²
Equivalent in sq ft8.07M sq ft
Retail levels (2018)3
Gross leasable areaNot published
Masterplan investmentAED 180bn
DeveloperEmaar Properties
Build programme (Dec 2025)c. 3 years

Anchors & districts

The announced components — all from the 2018 plan

Dubai Square was set out in 2018 as a series of distinct destinations rather than a single trading floor. Each anchor pulls a different visitor with a different dwell time, which is the variable that should drive where a brand asks to sit.

Read these as intent, not specification. Every component below comes from the July 2018 launch. Emaar’s December 2025 statement did not repeat any of them — it described the scheme in terms of the drive-through format, integrated transport and pedestrian streets instead. Confirm each one before you build a business case that depends on it.

Chinatown

Announced as the largest Chinatown district in the Middle East. A dedicated destination-within-a-destination, and a direct route to Chinese and wider East Asian visitor spend.

Art District

Exhibition space and fashion museums integrated into the retail floors. Long-dwell, high-intent traffic — the adjacency premium categories usually pay for.

Entertainment arena

An events and performance arena with 3D projection mapping and theatrical sound and lighting. Evening and weekend peaks, with the F&B and impulse patterns that follow them.

Rooftop waterpark

A rooftop water attraction — a full-day family visit anchor, which reshapes basket size and the case for larger-format family and sportswear units.

Ice Adventure

An ice-themed attraction in the tradition of Ski Dubai at Mall of the Emirates: a weatherproof anchor that holds footfall through the summer months.

Cineplex & VR

Cinema and virtual-reality facilities, plus a plaza programmed with music, colour and fire shows. Late-trading footfall that supports extended F&B hours.

Developer render of Dubai Square, Dubai Creek Harbour
An internal shopping streetDeveloper render, released by Emaar. Renders are marketing material issued ahead of construction and are not a representation of the delivered building. Three trading levels, a glazed roof and a pedestrian street section — the format most of the 2018 component plan sits inside.

Components as announced by Dubai Holding and Emaar in July 2018. Final configuration and operators have not been published, and none of these components was restated in the December 2025 relaunch.

Access & format

The “drive-through mall”, explained plainly

The headline claim in Emaar’s December 2025 statement is a world-first drive-through mall design, with a fully integrated transport network feeding pedestrian-friendly internal streets. It is the one genuinely new element in the relaunch, and dedicated electric-vehicle access into the centre has been reported alongside it.

The developer has not published the operational detail, so a tenant should treat this as a design intent rather than a specification. But the direction of travel is clear enough to plan around: vehicle circulation inside the envelope means the traditional distinction between a mall frontage and a street frontage softens, and kerbside handover for click-and-collect and same-day delivery becomes a design feature rather than a service-corridor afterthought.

Question to ask the leasing team: does the drive-through spine generate a second class of frontage — and is it priced differently from the pedestrian mall line?

Developer render of Dubai Square, Dubai Creek Harbour
The drive-through spineDeveloper render, released by Emaar. Renders are marketing material issued ahead of construction and are not a representation of the delivered building. Note the two frontage conditions in one street: vehicles and kerbside on the carriageway, pedestrian shopfronts under the colonnade.

Architectural character

Published descriptions point to a modern reinterpretation of Middle Eastern architecture with industrial elements, a glazed roof and extensive skylights, walkable internal boulevards, landscaped green space and a central Grand Plaza. Emaar has described using skylights, LED installations and glazing to shape a sensory, daylit environment rather than an enclosed box.

For fit-out planning, the practical implication is daylight. High natural light levels change lighting specification, visual merchandising and materials — and they affect which of a brand’s existing store formats can be reused without redesign.

Technology

The in-centre stack a tenant would inherit

Emaar said in February 2024 that it is deploying AI systems to analyse and predict what retailers and visitors need. The specific components below, however, come from the 2018 launch and have not been restated since — so treat this page as the list of questions to put to the leasing team, not as a specification you can design a store against.

Omnichannel retail platform

A centre-wide platform linking online and in-store trading, with custom mobile apps. Implies a landlord-operated commerce layer your systems will need to talk to — confirm what the integration burden is, and who owns the resulting customer data.

RFID stock visibility

RFID across the centre. Where a brand already tags at source, this is largely free capability: accurate on-hand counts, faster replenishment, and ship-from-store becoming viable in a market where it usually isn’t.

Click-and-collect infrastructure

Shared collection infrastructure paired with the drive-through access design. Reduces the back-of-house area a store needs to reserve for order pickup — which is space that can go back into trading floor.

Smart fitting rooms

Interactive mirrors in fitting rooms. Relevant mostly to apparel: request the hardware specification early, because it determines fitting-room dimensions and power and data provision in the fit-out drawings.

AI recommendation & personalisation

Centre-level personalised recommendation. The commercial question is discovery: how a brand new to the market is surfaced to a visitor who has not searched for it, and whether that placement is earned, allocated or sold.

Mobile payments & LED environment

Mobile payment acceptance throughout, and interactive LED technology across the public realm. Confirm which digital display surfaces are landlord inventory and which sit within the demised area, as it changes the marketing budget line materially.

Timeline

How the project got here

Dubai Square has a long announcement history. A tenant planning around it should understand that history rather than anchor on any single date.

Planning note. On a scheme of this scale, a slip of twelve to eighteen months is normal rather than exceptional. Build the lease model so that a delayed handover shifts cost rather than stranding it — and negotiate the rent commencement trigger accordingly.

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