Shopping mall
- For the traditional meaning of the word mall, see mall.
A shopping mall is a building or set of buildings that contain stores/shops and have interconnecting walkways that make it easy for people to walk from store to store. The walkways may or may not be enclosed. In the United Kingdom and Australia these are called shopping centres or shopping arcades.
A strip mall is a type of shopping mall where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front. They face major traffic arterials and tend to be self-contained with few pedestrian connections to surrounding neighborhoods. In the United Kingdom these are called "retail parks" or "out of town shopping centres", even though they might not be out of town.
History
The first enclosed shopping mall ever built was the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele in Milan, Italy. Many other large cities created similar malls in the late 19th century and early 20th century along similar lines.
In the late 20th century, with the rise of the suburb and automobile culture in the United States, a new form of mall was created away from city centers. The design is modeled after small town main streets in the USA, but placed entirely indoors. This new generation of mall was pioneered by Northgate, located in north Seattle, in 1950, and Southdale, located in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, Minnesota, in 1956.
A very large shopping mall is sometimes called a megamall. The largest enclosed shopping mall is the West Edmonton Mall in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. The world's largest shopping complex at one discrete location is the two-mall agglomeration of the Plaza at King of Prussia and the Court at King of Prussia in the Philadelphia suburb of King of Prussia, Pennsylvania. The largest mall in the United States is the Mall of America, located near the Twin Cities in Bloomington, Minnesota.
Shopping_Mall.jpg
The Mall of Arabia inside Dubai Land in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, which will open in 2006, will become the largest mall in the world.
Mall can refer to a shopping mall, which is a place where a collection of shops all adjoin a pedestrian area, or an exclusively pedestrian street, that allows shoppers to walk without interference from vehicle traffic. Mall is generally used in North America and Australasia to refer to large shopping areas, while the term arcade is more often used, especially in Britain, to refer to a narrow pedestrian-only street, often covered or between closely spaced buildings. A larger, often only partly covered but exclusively pedestrian shopping area is in Britain also termed a shopping precinct or pedestrian precinct.
In recent times, as more modern facilities are built, many early malls have become largely abandoned, due to decreased traffic and tenancy. These dated and deteriorating "dead malls" have failed to attract new business and often sit unused for many years until restored, or demolished. Unique examples of architecture and urban design, these structures often attract people who explore and photograph them.
Until the mid-1990s, the trend was to build enclosed malls and to renovate older outdoor malls into enclosed ones. Such malls had advantages like temperature control.
Since then, the trend has turned. Now it is fashionable to build open-air malls again, and some enclosed malls have literally been ripped open, such as the Sherman Oaks Galleria.
See also
- List of shopping malls
- Outlet mall
- Plaza
- Market
- Main street
- High street
- Premium outlet
- Square
- Department store
- The Westfield Group - an Australian-owned company with international locations
External links
- History of the Shopping Center and Mall (http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/filmnotes/shoppingcenter.html)
- DeadMalls.com (http://www.deadmalls.com)
da:Indkøbscenter de:Einkaufszentrum fr:Centre commercial ja:ショッピングセンター