Mall Ratz
According to Alan Erhenhaldt’s 2024 governing.com piece “The Once & Future Shopping Mall,” the pinnacle of the traditional mall was in the 1980s and ’90s, with the height of construction being in 1982.
After several economic crises, the development and rise of online shopping, and the global pandemic, what was once an American, ideal “Third Space”—a space that is neither home nor work, according to sociologist Ray Oldenburg in his 1989 book The Great Good Place—has devolved into unoccupied and empty spaces.
From ski slopes in Dubai’s Mall of the Emirates—that trend is now in effect in New Jersey at American Dream, the second largest mall in the country—and Germany’s merger of retail, entertainment, and transportation, with malls and train stations merging, “the mall” is an entity that is continuously adapting in this world of digital retail…