During his recent official visit to Italy, Turkish President Abdullah Gul tweeted praise for Rome’s beauty, but when he commended its lack of shopping malls and skyscrapers, he reignited perennial Turkish bickering on the topic.

While part of the population and government see shopping malls as entertaining and beneficial for Turkey's economy and society, others express concern for the destruction of small shopkeepers’ and artisans’ business, and some blame shopping malls for contributing to alienation, slamming them as the “holy shrines of consumer capitalism.”

Small wonder the opposition to building a new shopping mall in central Istanbul sparked a chain of protests this past summer. While there will be no shopping mall at that particular location, more are being built across the country.

Hurriyet printed a report prepared by the MPG/RDM consulting company on Jan. 24. The front-page article “Shopping malls: the locomotive of the economy” counted 333 malls in Turkey, with a complete rentable space totaling 9.2 million square meters [99 million square feet]. In terms of contribution to the economy, the shopping-mall sector provided 360,000 jobs in 2012 and 385,000 in 2013. The total number of visitors to shopping malls was 1.5 billion in 2012, and that number rose to 1.6 billion in 2013. Hence, expectations are positive, and the building of new facilities goes on. In 2014, there should be around 35 new shopping malls opened in Turkey. This would raise the total investment in this sector to $50 billion. For 2014, envisioned sales are estimated at 75 billion lira ($34 billion).