I-City: Bright Lights, Dull Future

I-City in Shah Alam opened to much fanfare and promise. When it was just opened, many locals flock to this area and came back with beautiful pictures of this LED-lighted park. But beautiful pictures don't translate to actual atmosphere and tourist satisfaction. In my opinion, it was all down to bad planning and bad management. The beautiful park sucks up tons of electricity to power up the LED-lighted trees and maintenance is not cheap. In order to stay afloat, good attractions should be in place to continuously generate interests among visitors so they will return again. However, this place is half dead with only the trees shining brightly. The only visitors keeping this place filled are students from government sponsored schools which come in bus loads. Many commercial buildings around this park are vacant. Without commercial and shopping activities, there will be no drawing power to bring in visitors. The only attractions at the moment are the small water theme park which operates in the day and the boring amusement park cum snow center which operates at night. Parking fee is exorbitant and if you want to rely on public transport, then you're out of luck as this place is in the middle of nowhere. The boring rides at the amusement park are very costly if you pay a-la-carte. Perhaps the management should learn from the success of Sunway Pyramids. LED trees alone will not grow money nor attract investors and visitors. Currently, residents in Klang and Shah Alam have to travel far to Mid Valley or Sunway for weekend entertainment cum shopping activities. If you put a nice shopping mall beside the park, then there are more reasons for the residents here to come down to I-City rather than one time affair with the LED trees.

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