I just found out that it's called a mall because instead of going to one store, you can go to all of them. The word mall, like shopping mall, has come a long and winding path, starting with the Italian game of pallamaglio, which was played with a ball and a mallet. The name of the game came into French as pallemaille, which in turn became English pall mall. Pall Mall is now the name of a street in central London where the game was once played, and The Mall, which also hosted those games, is now a tree-lined promenade that leads to Buckingham Palace.
In the 1950s, the word mall was applied to streets that were closed so that stores were comfortable for pedestrians. Later, the mall was used to denote complexes built specifically for shopping and located outside urban centers. This is part of a full episode. A regional mall, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, is a mall with a gross leasable area of 400,000 square feet (37,000 to 800,000 square feet) of gross leasable area with at least two main stores.
At a minimum to be considered a shopping mall, 37,000 m² (400,000 square feet) have a mall in their names, for example in Namibia or Zambia. The term shopping mall mainly refers to a shopping center (a place where a group of stores adjoin a pedestrian area) or to an exclusively pedestrian street that allows shoppers to walk without the interference of vehicle traffic. Shopping malls are located in the center of cities, usually located in old and historic shopping districts, and are surrounded by subsidiary outdoor shopping streets. The term mall originally meant a pedestrian walkway with stores along it (that is, the term was used to refer to the walkway itself that was simply bordered by those stores), but in the late 1960s, it began to be used as a generic term for large enclosed malls that were becoming commonplace at that time.
Some examples include the Main Place shopping center in Buffalo (1996) and The Gallery (1977, now Fashion District Philadelphia) in Philadelphia. In Canadian English, and often in Australia and New Zealand, the term “mall” can be used informally, but the name of the complex will include “mall” or simply “center” (such as Toronto Eaton Centre). A superregional mall, according to the International Council of Shopping Centers, is a mall with more than 800,000 square feet (74,000 m²) of gross leasable area, three or more presenters, mass commerce, more variety of fashion clothing and that serves as the main shopping center in the region (25 miles or 40 km) in which it is located. You can also build a vertical shopping center where geography prevents building to the outside or where there are other restrictions on construction, such as historic buildings or important archaeological sites.
When Victor Gruen developed the mall format in the mid-1950s, it was necessary to sign with department stores to ensure the financial stability of the projects and attract retail traffic, which would also result in visits to the mall's smaller stores. Cities facilitated the construction of closed shopping centers in the city center as an effort to reactivate urban centers and allow them to compete effectively with suburban malls. Other primitive malls moved retail from dense malls to mostly residential suburbs. This is an incomplete list of the largest malls in the world based on their gross leasable area (SBA), with an SBA of at least 250,000 m2 (2,700,000 square feet).
One controversial aspect of shopping malls has been their effective movement away from traditional main streets or main streets...
