Contractors have been invited to express interest in construction work on the world’s largest shopping mall at Emaar Properties’ Dubai Creek Harbour.

According to sources close to the project, the retail district is expected to have an area of 1.4 million square metres. It is not clear if that is the total gross leasable area. Emaar’s Dubai Mall, which is the world’s largest shopping centre by total area, has a total area of 1.124 million sq m. The biggest mall in the world by gross leasable area is China’s New South China Mall in Dongguan with 670,000 sq m.

Dubai Holding’s Mall of the World project was launched in 2014 with a retail area of about 750,000 sq m. There has been little physical progress on the project since then.

In an interview with US TV news agency CNN in early June, Emaar chairman Mohammed Alabbar confirmed that the mall at Dubai Creek Harbour will be larger than Dubai Mall.

The development manager for the Dubai Creek Harbour retail district is South Africa’s Mirage. MEED reported in February that Emaar had bought a stake in the consultancy firm. The programme manager for the Dubai Creek Harbour development is the UK’s Faithful & Gould.

The Dubai Creek Harbour development will also be home to a new $1bn tower that will be at least 100 metres taller than the 828-metre Burj Khalifa. Alabbar has said he plans to break ground on the site in July.

Contractors have been invited to attend workshops on the construction of the plaza area that will be built at the base of the tower.

Work on the foundations package will start first and the substructure will take about a year to complete.

The tower is being designed by Spain’s Santiago Calatrava. The engineer is the local office of Aurecon.