The mall is dead. Or is it?
People have been predicting the death of the mall since the 80s, says Alexandra Lange, author of Meet Me by the Fountain: An Inside History of the Mall.
And yet, as Lange writes in her book, people keep shopping, and "the majority of malls survive".
As a phenomenon, the indoor mall emerged in the postwar boom in the US, and became a centrepiece of suburban planning.
The world's first, Southdale Center, was built in Minnesota in 1956; 30 years later, the mall dominated the retail landscape in countries such as the US and Australia.
"Since then, they've only grown more," says Matthew Bailey, a retail historian at Macquarie University.
Not without challenge, of course — most recently, the advent of online shopping, and COVID-19 lockdowns around the globe.
The mall has also changed dramatically over the decades, an evolution summarised by Lange in Meet Me by the Fountain:
"The 1960s bring architectural ambition, with the country's best architects and landscape architects designing a building that can change with the fashions. The 1970s bring the mall back downtown, enlivening former industrial buildings and pedestrianizing streets in an attempt to revitalize the city. The 1980s bring roller coasters; the 1990s bring pop stars; the 2000s bring dead malls and faux Main Streets."
To remain relevant, both the mall's architectural form and its retail offering must "keep up with the times", Lange told ABC RN's Blueprint for Living.
The history of the mall
The enclosed, climate-controlled mall developed in the US after World War II in response to the twin forces of suburbanisation and increased car ownership.
In the 50s, retail sales in inner-city areas began to stagnate at the same time as sales in the suburbs boomed, says Bailey.
"With more people driving cars, retail needed to adapt."
Austrian-born architect Victor Gruen developed the concept of the suburban indoor mall — anchored by department stores and filled with specialty shops — as a counterpoint to the urban sprawl and chaotic downtowns that characterised most US cities.
"[He] argued to a couple of key department store owners that they really needed to follow their customer out to the suburb," says Lange.
Inspired by European cities, Gruen envisioned a kind of new-age town square: a collection of stores linked by communal space, with air-conditioning and plenty of on-site parking.
"He had very fond memories of the pedestrian atmosphere of Vienna with outdoor cafes and shops," Lange says.
When the Gruen-designed Southdale – a climate-controlled building with two department stores, 75,000 square metres of shops and 5,200 parking spaces – opened in Minneapolis in October 1956, it made national news headlines.
In Minneapolis, with its bitter winter, scorching summer and wet spring and autumn, Southdale lured visitors and retailers with the promise of year-round shopping.
Its design included a north-facing clerestory (a wall of windows situated above eye level), which looked down upon a three-storey garden court complete with 15-metre-tall eucalypts and magnolias, and two enormous metal sculptures by American artist Harry Bertoia.
In line with Gruen's desire to create community centres, not just places of commerce, the earliest American malls featured non-commercial spaces such as church-run community rooms and civic offices.
Ironically, perhaps, today Gruen is associated with a different concept: the Gruen transfer, when a visit to the mall shifts from necessity to pleasure and you find yourself buying things you didn't know you needed.
A chequered past
For all Gruen's idealism, early malls were not egalitarian and accessible spaces.
In the US, early malls were racially segregated.
"Low-interest-rate mortgages that allowed so many former service members to buy their first homes in these newly built suburbs were largely available only to white servicemen," says Lange.
As a result, "the people that would have been using those early malls were generally white women and children and then on the weekends, white families".
Many malls were anti-public transport and anti-pedestrian by design.
"A lot of the early mall owners … discouraged public transportation from reaching the malls, either by saying they didn't want to be on a bus route or by putting the bus stop across the highway from the mall," says Lange
To access a mall, you needed a car – and the income to afford one – which made the mall inaccessible for many Black and working-class people.
The evolution of the mall
The mall didn't remain the preserve of white middle-class housewives for long. By the 70s, their children became teenagers and wanted to go to the mall on their own, says Lange.
The mall adapted, introducing arcades and teen-focused retail chains, such as Hot Topic.
It served as a social hub for teens; a parent-sanctioned place where they knew they would run into people they knew, before the age of mobile phones.
Correspondingly, the mall became a touchstone of youth culture, serving as the setting for films such as George Romero's 1978 zombie horror flick Dawn of the Dead, Kevin Smith's 1995 slacker comedy Mallrats, and Clueless, the 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's Emma.
It wasn't just the young who flocked to the mall, however: mall walkers, walking groups of mostly older people, began to meet in malls in the quiet of the early morning for their daily exercise.
"The mall was actually a much easier place to walk than most American suburbs, some of which don't have sidewalks, don't have streetlights, don't have bathrooms and benches. All of these things are provided by the mall … [and] make public life more convenient," Lange says.
An Australian variety of mall
Australia's first indoor mall – or shopping centre, as we call them – opened at Chermside in Brisbane in 1957.
Since then, the Australian shopping centre has evolved its own distinct characteristics thanks largely to the nation's planning legislation, says retail historian Matthew Bailey.
While in America you could build a shopping centre almost anywhere, land-use zoning in Australia has served to concentrate different types of economic activity in specific locations; there are designated sites where you can get approval to build retail developments.
In Sydney, for example, each municipality generally has one large shopping centre which is "protected from competition to a degree by planning legislation," Bailey says.
The result is a "multi-layered" shopping centre with a formal food provision – generally a supermarket as well as grocers, butchers and other specialty food shops.
A tighter regulatory environment has also protected Australia from the "dead malls" seen so often in the US, where dozens of shops lie empty in deserted retail developments. In Australia, where there is less retail floor space per capita than in the US, demand for retail space remains high.
Bailey sees Australia sitting somewhere between Europe and the US in its approach to retail development.
"Our planning is influenced by European ideas and our business models we import from America. England, for example, has tighter planning laws and different kinds of property ownership structures, which means it has fewer shopping centres than Australia," he says.
Adapt or die
The demise of the department store as society's leading taste-maker due to the combined effect of closures, consolidation and the internet has created an existential challenge for mall owners.
Young people today are more likely to take their style cues from Instagram than from a bricks-and-mortar department store.
"If that is the anchor for your mall, and those stores closed, or those stores aren't attracting people, that's a real problem," says author Alexandra Lange.
To survive, malls have had to diversify and adapt to changing consumer preferences.
With the decline of mass shopping culture, "the smartest mall owners have recognised that they couldn't keep doing things the same way they always had," Lange says.
Some malls introduced sophisticated food halls while others invested in family entertainment. "Instead of an anchor department store, you'll have a trampoline park," she says.
Others have transformed into what Lange calls "ethnic marketplaces" that serve a multicultural population.
In Asia, a new type of mall – one that is urban and vertical – developed to suit a distinctly different urban environment.
"In Chinese cities, the mall is often a respite from the density and intensity of the city outside, whereas in the US, the mall is kind of an intensifier – it's the one place people can go where they know they're going to see other people and be walking around with other people rather than in their cars," says Lange.
The 21st-century mall
Retail historian Matthew Bailey says the future of the mall lies in further diversification: "We tend to think of the shopping centre purely in terms of retail, but they encompass a far wider range of functions than just shopping."
Made from "big slabs of concrete", large shopping centres look monolithic, "[but] the people who manage them are very adept at responding to market conditions, incorporating new technologies – even online [retail]," he says.
Viewed as a "privately owned public space", the mall can house anything, from schools to whole communities, says Bailey, who believes the mall's future is secure – for now.
"Any talk of the mall disappearing or dying is very premature. They'll be around for quite a long time because they still work very effectively as a social and commercial space."
