Shopping Mall

Shopping malls are large buildings or building complexes that house a variety of retail stores and restaurants under one roof. They were first conceived by Austrian American architect Victor Gruen in the early 1950s. Over the next forty years, they gradually increased in popularity. Decreasing quality and overabundance, however, started to force malls out of public favor in the 1990s and 2000s. In the twenty-first century, amid the supremacy of online commerce, shopping malls are considered a dying industry, with many around the world closing and falling into disrepair and few new ones opening to replace them. Some shopping malls survived by incorporating increasingly diverse uses. 

The Birth of Shopping Malls

The hundreds of thousands of shopping malls worldwide have come to symbolize commercialism in the modern age. Early versions of malls appeared in different places and at different times. A shopping mall, for instance, was conceptualized in 1898 by English urban planner Ebenezer Howard, whose "garden cities" combined the popular shopping arcades of London with indoor botanical gardens in one large building.

Modern malls, however, were invented in the 1950s in the United States by architect Victor Gruen, an Austrian immigrant. In a 1952 article published in Progressive Architecture, Gruen detailed his plan to revolutionize the urban American shopping center. He would build large, enclosed centers called shopping malls, featuring many retail businesses under the same roof. These would be located in suburban areas to entice the commercialism and vitality of large cities to reinvigorate what Gruen saw as the tedium of American suburbia. Additionally, Gruen wanted his shopping malls to be part of larger civic centers, including libraries, post offices, and various public assembly areas. This plan was ultimately structured to make malls destinations in themselves, rather than simply another kind of shopping.

At that time, the majority of American shopping took place in downtown areas, where retail stores and restaurants were situated on busy main streets. The American public, therefore, considered Gruen's proposal shocking.

Gruen opened the first prototype shopping mall, the Southdale Center, in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956. In accordance with his plan to make malls centers of public life, Gruen built the structure around a large outdoor meeting area similar to the town squares of Europe. Seventy-five thousand people turned out for Southdale's opening day, which was the start of what would become the United States' close relationship with shopping malls.

Americans were amazed by the two-story, air-conditioned retail complex, which featured pleasing aesthetic components such as indoor fountains and greenery. Of Southdale's immediate success, the media wrote that shopping malls had already infused American popular culture. This positive response prompted Gruen and his architectural company to continue building malls throughout the United States into the 1960s.

By that time, however, Gruen had come to despise the large-scale urban development that the success of his malls generated. He had hoped his malls would contain urban sprawl by placing all the consumers' retail needs under one roof. To Gruen, the construction of new freeways and parking lots to service the malls was a tragic and unintended byproduct of his original invention. He returned to Vienna in 1968 to work on more low-key architectural projects. However, shopping malls continued to grow in the United States without him.

Peak and Decline

Malls became more popular over the next thirty years, not only in the United States but all around the world. China, in particular, eventually developed many of the world's largest and busiest shopping malls. The success of American malls peaked in 1990 when nineteen opened across the United States. However, over the next fifteen to twenty years, several factors began to turn Americans' shopping trends against malls, beginning their relatively rapid decline in the United States.

In their prime years, malls had become popular targets of investors, who bought them, collected the federal tax deductions granted as their value declined, and sold them after several years for profits. Because this process was meant to produce returns as quickly as possible, the investors did not devote time or funding to renovating outdated or dilapidated malls, which fell into further disrepair.

Another factor contributing to the demise of American malls was their saturation. Too many malls in close proximity began to make most of them redundant, and national mall profits steadily fell in the early years of the twenty-first century. Meanwhile, malls that had not been renovated for many years began to be viewed as unsafe by American shoppers, who, in any case, had already turned to online retailers for much of their shopping. The role of Internet commerce in the demise of shopping malls cannot be understated.

Though some malls in various countries continue to thrive, many have closed or have such high store vacancy rates that they are considered dead malls. These are outdated, deteriorating malls with few open stores or consumer traffic. The New South China Mall in Guangdong, China, for instance, is the largest mall in the world. It opened in 2005, but it was 99 percent vacant a decade later.

In 2014, the real estate analysts Green Street Advisors claimed that 15 percent of American malls would close in the succeeding ten years, a 5 percent increase from a 2012 prediction. The analysts said that many of these closures would result from the departure of anchor stores, the large major retail stores that generate most of a mall's business. Popular American anchor stores include Sears, JCPenney, and Macy's. When any of these successful, customer-drawing stores leaves a mall, according to predictions, that mall's risk of financial failure intensifies considerably.

These circumstances have led to the decline of the once-powerful shopping mall. In the mid-2010s, about one thousand malls remained open in the United States. While exact estimates were difficult to quantify, in the early 2020s, the number continued to decrease. Projections showed these numbers were likely to continue to decline. Further, many malls that continued to exist suffered from high rates of vacancies. Older malls were being transformed for newer uses, such as mixed-use space, offices, residential offerings, medical facilities, and community gathering areas. Some were being turned into sports facilities or family amusement centers. In many ways, these new uses for old malls aligned with Gruen's original vision. 

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