A shopping mall, in America also called the 'shopping center' is a completely unique part of the world's shopping, and it is found in the suburbs. It is not at all the same as a shopping centre, shopping arcade, shopping precinct, or any other kind of shop found elsewhere. Many other countries have copied using the word 'mall', but the scale of the US Shopping Mall is completely different from most other countries, with the exception of some in the Middle East, SE Asia and China.
It was invented in the US in the 1950s when people became wealthier, and car owning was a new part of life. As a result of this people moved to the suburbs. Fuel prices for automobiles was so low that people found they could drive anywhere at almost no cost. New laws in America also gave special deals for people wanting to develop on the edges of cities. So it became cheaper to develop on the edges than to rebuild the middle.
But as the suburbs grew, they were made out of houses, with no centre to them as had happened in the past. So the idea of the shopping centre/shopping mall in America was to start up a centre for people to come to and to feel part of a community. With almost limitless space, these centres were designed so that people could drive to them, then leave their cars and walk into the centre which was organised almost like a traditional market square. It was hoped that they would be joined by libraries, schools and other public services. But that never happened. The idea of a weather-protected shopping area was immediately successful, however, and so malls were copied all over America without any thought to making them part of a 'town centre'.
The shopping mall is a shopping experience. The idea was to attract well-known department stores to draw in crowds of people. They would be placed at the ends of the mall (geographers call them 'anchor stores') and then rows of smaller shops placed between them. The reason for this is that the smaller specialist stores would not be enough on their own to attract people from a wide area. In the end the idea was to copy what happens on a traditional high street, but to control it under one roof.
The idea of giant shopping complex was pioneered by an architect called Victor Gruen. The first one was opened in Minnesota, USA in October 1956. The model was so successful, Gruen has been called the "most influential architect of the twentieth century". However, the public facilities that Gruen also wanted never came to pass.
The Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, is the largest shopping mall in the United States and the world's most visited mall. The largest mall in the world is the New South China Mall in Dongguan, China. It covers nearly a million square metres of floor space. All of the other largest malls are in SE Asia. The largest enclosed shopping mall in Canada is the West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta. It is the fifth largest mall in the world.
The King of Prussia Mall Philadelphia, Pennsylvania has the most shopping per square foot in the US.
By all of these standards, malls in the UK such as Lakeside in E London/Essex, are modest. It has a quarter of the floor space of the world's largest.
