The Mall Now
About a half-century ago, Victor Gruen created shopping mall by relocating strip-shops shopping along the highway into shopping inside a big climate controlled environment with security and corporate management.
As much as the enormous scale of the mall can mean to a city, he stressed the importance of the corporate strength to come from the strength of the individual shops.
Back then, shopping along the shop-lots were dangerous and the strip-shopping activity is deemed single-used. Even until today, it still is. The essential idea of a mall is to solve those problems.
The mixed-development today, although often privatized comes close to the initial dream of Gruen.
However, the lack of imagination meeting the needs today renders the use of these malls single-used, despite varieties that were added in terms of the activities due to the same category proposed.
As soon as the malls are getting more and more, competitions are inevitable.
The size of the mall, especially when the way of acquisition becomes less stringent, will soon get large enough that the sense of security of the shoppers would gradually disappear.
The enormous climate-control is overwhelming. Perhaps a larger coverage of the mall is needed but with smaller localized climate-control on the human level.
Satellite idea is needed to fuse new function with shopping.
A strip of "mall" is formed in every Friday prayer in the Muslim countries and places with recreational value like the park and then disappear.
The Gruen Transfer effect (the layout of a mall to intentionally confuse user to manipulate their buying lust, as opposed to a layout with clear directional journey) shall end with a reintroduction of the idea of a mall connecting a few points of interest revitalizing the unutilized routes, with localized climate-controlled and complementary function of a different category.