Market Village

Market Village is a mall in Markham, Ontario and is a 325,000 square feet Chinese mall in Toronto.

Built by Cedarland Properties Limited in 1990, it attempts to mirror and mimic a rural town Ontario, the northwest and southeast façades feature barn like and farm house designs. In the 1800s and early 1900s, the property was farmland.

Market Village was originally built as a retail addition to the Cullen Country Barns located to the west side of the new mall along Kennedy Road.

However, the new tenants of the mall were (and still are) mainly catering to Cantonese Chinese clientele and attracted few non-Chinese shoppers in the early years. Some parts of the south side of the mall was enclosed in 1995 (two storey office space was demolished during this time). Many of the original tenants have left and in their place new stores reflecting the retail trends within the Chinese community in the Greater Toronto Area.

The mall was threatened with new competition by the newer Pacific Mall, which was built on the location of the former Cullen Country Barns (demolished), but the two malls have co-existed and dominates retail in the region. Indeed, as the existing traffic and parking was already congested with the opening of Market Village, the addition of Pacific Mall has made these problems significantly worse (for instance, the underground parking in Pacific Mall is not nearly enough to handle the customers attracted by the new complex).