Shopping mall

• 1. Introduction

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  Shopping malls are so woven into everyday life that it is easy to forget someone had to invent them. In October 1956, a fully enclosed, regionally scaled shopping complex opened in Edina, Minnesota, a suburb of the Twin Cities. Its architect was Victor Gruen, an Austrian-born immigrant who had come to America and reshaped how an entire continent would shop. The building was called Southdale Center, and it set off a chain of events that would fill suburban landscapes with millions of square feet of air-conditioned retail space, reshape downtowns, and eventually stall, leaving behind a generation of what real estate experts would come to call dead malls. How did a single enclosed building in Minnesota change the global retail landscape? Why did America build so many malls that the market eventually choked on them? And what has replaced them, or tried to?

• 2. Ancient Arcades, Modern Anchors

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  In 1798, the first covered shopping passage was built in Paris: the Passage du Caire. London followed with the Royal Opera Arcade in 1816 and the more famous Burlington Arcade in 1819. By 1828, Providence, Rhode Island had the Arcade, which claims to be the first shopping arcade in the United States. The Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan opened in 1877, and it was large enough to inspire the word "galleria" as a template for later structures.

  These nineteenth-century arcades established a key idea: protect the shopper from the weather, and they will stay longer. But the automobile era demanded a different form. Market Square in Lake Forest, Illinois, built in 1916, and Country Club Plaza in Kansas City, Missouri, built in 1924, were early shopping centers designed around cars rather than foot traffic. After World War II, this model scaled up further. The Broadway-Crenshaw Center in Los Angeles, built in 1947, ran to 550,000 square feet and was anchored by a five-story Broadway department store alongside a May Company California.

  Before Southdale opened its doors, the term "shopping mall" was already gaining currency in another context. The Kalamazoo Mall, which debuted in 1959 as the first of its kind, used the word in its original sense: a pedestrianized promenade where shoppers could walk without cars. Lincoln Road Mall in Miami Beach and the Santa Monica Mall of 1965 followed the same logic. Bergen Mall had opened in 1957 using the word "mall" in its name, and it nudged other suburban properties to rebrand themselves similarly, even though the industry still called them shopping centers through the end of the 1960s.

• 3. Victor Gruen's Invention

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  On the 10th of March 1955, the Valley Fair Shopping Center in Appleton, Wisconsin, opened as one of the earliest enclosed examples. It offered central heating and cooling, a large outdoor parking area, and semi-detached anchor stores. Later that same year, the world's first fully enclosed shopping mall opened in Luleå, in northern Sweden; the architect was Ralph Erskine, and the building was simply named Shopping. That region of Sweden now claims the highest shopping center density in Europe.

  Southdale Center, which followed in October 1956, was different in scale and intent. Gruen designed it to be a regional destination, drawing shoppers from across a wide area. Canadian writer Malcolm Gladwell later described Gruen as "the most influential architect of the twentieth century" for what that building set in motion.

  Southdale inspired a wave of enclosed malls: Harundale Mall in Glen Burnie, Maryland in 1958; Big Town Mall in Mesquite, Texas in 1959; Chris-Town Mall in Phoenix, Arizona in 1961; and Randhurst Center in Mount Prospect, Illinois in 1962. The enclosed mall's formula was legible: stores attached to a sheltered corridor, situated away from downtown, reachable only by car. It became a template for retail construction worldwide.

  Gruen himself grew to despise what his template had unleashed. He decried the creation of "enormous land wasting seas of parking" and the spread of suburban sprawl. A design meant to create a civic gathering place had produced something else entirely: an automobile-dependent monoculture on the suburban fringe.

• 4. The Art of Keeping Shoppers Inside

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  A. Alfred Taubman of Taubman Centers pushed mall design further in 1980, introducing terrazzo tiles, indoor fountains, and two levels at the Mall at Short Hills in New Jersey. The two-level format allowed shoppers to make a full circuit of every store, visiting both floors without retracing their steps.

  Taubman held a specific theory about flooring. He believed carpeting increased friction, literally slowing shoppers down, so he had it removed. The lighting strategy was equally deliberate: fading daylight through glass panels was supplemented by gradually increasing electric light, creating the impression that the afternoon was lasting longer than it was. Shoppers lingered, and lingering meant spending.

  High land prices in dense cities produced a different variant. The "vertical mall" concept was originally conceived in the late 1960s by the Mafco Company, formerly the shopping center development division of Marshall Field and Co. The Water Tower Place skyscraper in Chicago, built in 1975 by Urban Retail Properties, realized this idea at full scale: a hotel, luxury condominiums, and office space sat atop an eight-level atrium retail mall fronting on the Magnificent Mile. The challenge of any vertical mall is persuading shoppers to move up and down rather than simply sideways; designers have relied on escalators and elevators, but also on anchor stores strategically placed at upper floors.

  Vertical malls spread widely across East and Southeast Asia, where land constraints made horizontal sprawl impossible. Hong Kong became a showcase, with examples including Times Square, Dragon Centre, Langham Place, and Hysan Place. In Shrewsbury in the United Kingdom, the Darwin Shopping Centre was built across seven floors on the side of a steep hill, threaded around the former town walls and connected by elevators, escalators, and bridge walkways.

• 5. A Glut That Could Not Sustain Itself

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  In the mid-1990s, malls were still being built in the United States at a rate of 140 a year. The number of American shopping centers had grown from 4,500 in 1960 to 70,000 by 1986, and to just under 108,000 by 2010. That trajectory was not tied to population growth or retail sales; it reflected a commercial real estate industry addicted to expansion for its own sake.

  A PricewaterhouseCoopers study published in 2001 identified "greyfield" and "dead mall" estates as an emerging problem. In 2007, no new malls were built in America for the first time in fifty years. City Creek Center Mall in Salt Lake City, which opened in March 2012, was the first built after the Great Recession.

  From 2006 to 2010, the share of malls falling into the "dying" category, defined as a vacancy rate of at least 40%, increased sharply, along with the share classed as unhealthy at 20-40% vacancy, or in trouble at 10-20%. By 2014, nearly 3% of all American malls had vacancy rates at or above 40%, and close to one-fifth had vacancy rates considered troubling at 10% or higher.

  Consumers were moving toward open-air power centers and lifestyle centers, drawn by lower prices and the convenience of parking directly in front of a single large store. Online shopping took further share: by 2013, roughly 200 out of 1,300 remaining malls were going out of business. By the time the mall operator Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield chose to exit the American market in 2022, the United States carried an average of 24.5 square feet of retail space per capita, compared to 4.5 square feet per capita across Europe. The disparity made visible what had been building for decades: America had simply built too many places to shop.

• 6. Second Lives and Global Divergence

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  Responses to the dying mall varied by geography and imagination. In the United States, the 600,000-square-foot Highland Mall was repurposed as a campus for Austin Community College. Developers across the country converted failing malls into parks, movie theaters, gyms, and even fishing lakes. In Canada, shopping centres have frequently been replaced with mixed-use high-rise communities.

  In France, the So Ouest mall outside Paris took a different approach to staying relevant: it was designed to resemble Louis XV-style apartments and incorporates 17,000 square meters of green space. The Australian mall company Westfield launched an online mall and later a mobile app offering 150 stores, 3,000 brands, and over one million products.

  Outside North America, the picture looked different. In Russia, large new malls were built near major cities, including the MEGA mall network such as the Mega Belaya Dacha near Moscow, financed by international investors and popular with shoppers from an emerging middle class. In many European countries and Asian countries, shopping malls continued to grow.

  The largest mall in the world today is the Iran Mall in Tehran, which opened in 2018 with a gross leasable area of 1,950,000 square meters and more than 2,500 shops. The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, which opened in 1992, remains the largest in the United States at 520,257 square meters, anchored by Nickelodeon Universe, a large indoor amusement park occupying 28,000 square meters at the mall's center. The first retail complex ever promoted as a "mall", Bergen Mall in Paramus, New Jersey, which opened on the 14th of November 1957, was later enclosed in 1973, and the arc from that modest New Jersey property to a 2,500-shop complex in Tehran measures just how far the concept traveled in under seventy years.