shopping centre

shopping centre, 20th-century adaptation of the historical marketplace, with accommodation made for automobiles. A shopping centre is a collection of independent retail stores, services, and a parking area conceived, constructed, and maintained by a management firm as a unit. Shopping centres may also contain restaurants, banks, theatres, professional offices, service stations, and other establishments.

Aspects considered by planners when a shopping centre is to be built include feasibility of the site in terms of the community’s ability to support a centre; adequate vehicular access; and size, access, and topography of the site, as well as availability of utilities, zoning laws, and land use in the immediate area. Economic conditions of the area, the sociology of the region, and local commercial competition and attitudes determine the size of centre that can be supported and the kind of stores acceptable to a given locale.

Shopping centres are generally of neighbourhood, community, or regional scope. The smallest type, the neighbourhood centre, usually has a supermarket as a focus, with daily convenience shops such as a drugstore, shoe repair, laundry, and dry cleaner accompanying it. At the opposite end of the size spectrum is the Mall of America in Bloomington, Minnesota, which opened in 1992 and remains the largest mall in the United States in terms of both area and number of retailers. By the mall’s 30th anniversary in 2022, an estimated 1.2 billion people had visited in total. It had grown to encompass 5.6 million square feet (520,000 square metres), with more than 520 businesses, large enough to merit its own ZIP code. It even offered a 7-acre (2.8-hectare) theme park, the biggest indoor theme park in the United States.

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The regional shopping centre provides a full range of shopping services comparable to those found in a small central business district. It is built around at least one full-size department store and often several; specialty shops and boutiques are numerous, and there are usually several restaurants and perhaps a motion-picture theatre. Services for the immediate day-to-day needs are minimized. On larger sites motels, medical centres, or office buildings may also be provided.

Car-parking facilities are a major consideration in shopping-centre design. The size and scope of the centre, the type of tenant, and the economics of the area partially determine parking needs, but it has been found that a ratio of 5.5 parking spaces per 1,000 square feet of leasable space is usually adequate; the Mall of America offers an astounding 13,000 parking spots. Access to the parking lots must be broad and easy enough to avoid traffic jams. On hilly sites the use of parking and service decks apart from the main consumer level is often advantageous.

Pedestrian and vehicular circulation within the centre are prime design considerations and should be kept physically separate as much as possible. Exceptions to this rule are the satellite placement of auto-accessory stores, movie theatres, and drive-in banks.

The first unified shopping mall, Country Club Plaza, founded by the J.C. Nichols Company, opened near Kansas City, Mo., in 1922. The first enclosed mall opened near Minneapolis, Minn., in 1956. In the 1980s there developed “megamalls,” such as the West Edmonton Mall in Alberta, Can. (opened in 1981), which contained not only more than 800 stores vending everything from footwear to automobiles but also restaurants, a hotel, an amusement park, a miniature-golf course, a church, a “water park” for sunbathing and surfing, a zoo, a 438-foot-long lake, and, scattered about, more than 500 kinds of trees.

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