Shopping mall

A shopping mall is a building or set of buildings that contain stores and have interconnecting walkways that make it easy for people to walk from store to store. The walkways may or may not be enclosed.

A strip mall is a type of shopping mall where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. The design is modeled after small town Main Streets[?] in the USA. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots[?] in front.

The first enclosed shopping mall ever built was Southdale, located in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, Minnesota, USA.

A large shopping mall is sometimes called a megamall. The two largest enclosed shopping malls are the West Edmonton Mall[?] in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and the Mall of America in another Twin Cities suburb, Bloomington, Minnesota, USA.

Mall can refer to a shopping mall, which is a place where a collection of shops all adjoin a pedestrian area, or exclusively pedestrian street, that allows shoppers to walk separately and isolated 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.

• Also related are plaza, market, square, department store.

External Links

History of the Shopping Center and Mall (http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/filmnotes/shoppingcenter.html)