Short answers, pulled from the story.
Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen designed Southdale Center, the first regionally scaled fully enclosed shopping mall, which opened in October 1956 in Edina, Minnesota. Gruen is credited with pioneering the enclosed mall concept, though he later condemned the suburban sprawl it created.
The world's first fully enclosed shopping mall opened in 1955 in Luleå, northern Sweden, designed by architect Ralph Erskine and named simply Shopping. The Southdale Center in Edina, Minnesota, which followed in October 1956, is credited with pioneering the regionally scaled enclosed mall format.
American malls declined due to oversupply, competition from open-air power centers and online shopping, and the broader retail apocalypse. The number of shopping centers grew from 4,500 in 1960 to nearly 108,000 by 2010, far outpacing population and retail growth. By 2014, nearly 3% of all U.S. malls had vacancy rates of 40% or higher.
The Iran Mall in Tehran is the largest shopping mall in the world, with a gross leasable area of 1,950,000 square meters and more than 2,500 shops. It opened in 2018.
A dead mall is a shopping mall with a vacancy rate of at least 40%, as defined by real estate experts. By 2013, roughly 200 out of 1,300 malls in the United States were going out of business, and by 2014 nearly 3% of all American malls had reached that dying threshold.
Struggling malls have been converted into parks, movie theaters, gyms, fishing lakes, and educational campuses. The 600,000-square-foot Highland Mall in the United States is being repurposed as a campus for Austin Community College. In Canada, shopping centres have frequently been replaced with mixed-use high-rise communities.