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Southdale's creator arrived in America as a refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna. Victor Gruen was a Jewish bohemian who began to design shops for fellow immigrants in New York after failing in cabaret theatre. His work was admired partly for its uncluttered, modernist look, which seemed revolutionary in 1930s America. But Gruen's secret was the way he used arcades and eye-level display cases to lure customers into stores almost against their will. As a critic complained, his shops were like mousetraps. A few years later the same would be said of his shopping malls.

By the 1940s department stores were already moving to the suburbs. Some had begun to build adjacent strips of shops, which they filled with boutiques in an attempt to re-create urban shopping districts. In 1947 a shopping centre opened in Los Angeles featuring two department stores, a cluster of small shops and a large car park. It was, in effect, an outdoor shopping mall. Fine for balmy southern California, perhaps, but not for Minnesota's harsh climate. Commissioned to build a shopping centre at Southdale in 1956, Gruen threw a roof over the structure and installed an air-conditioning system to keep the temperature at 75°F (24°C)—which a contemporary press release called “Eternal Spring”. The mall was born.

Oddly, this most suburban American invention was supposed to evoke a European city centre. Hence Southdale's density and its atrium, where shoppers were expected to sit and debate over cups of coffee, just as they do in the Piazza San Marco or the Place Dauphine. Gruen exiled cars, which he thought noisy and anti-social, to the outside of his mall. Most contemporary critics thought Gruen had succeeded in bringing urbanity to the suburbs. Southdale was “more like downtown than downtown itself”, claimed the Architectural Record. Another asserted, in a rare example of journalistic hyperbole that turned out to be absolutely right, that the indoor shopping mall was henceforth “part of the American way”.

As Jeffrey Hardwick explains in his excellent biography, Gruen did not believe his creation would take business away from downtown shopping districts. He saw it as an adjunct to them. If indoor shopping centres harmed any businesses, Gruen dearly hoped it would be the fast-food stands and tacky strip malls that were sprouting like weeds along main roads. Southdale's first tenants shared this sanguine view. When it opened it was filled not with national chains but with second branches of downtown merchants.

Tribes of the mall

By the early 1980s indoor shopping centres were woven tightly into American culture. New cuisines (the term is perhaps too grand) emerged in them, thanks to chains like Cinnabon and Panda Express, which did not exist outside malls. They began to swell to the point of absurdity. Canada's West Edmonton Mall, which opened in 1982, has an ice-skating rink, a pool with sea-lions and an indoor bungee jump. The Mall of America, in Minnesota, has three rollercoasters and more than 500 shops arranged in “streets” designed to appeal to different age groups. Every morning it opens early to accommodate a group of “mall walkers” who trudge around its 0.57-mile perimeter for exercise.

Artists and urban anthropologists began to note the appearance of mall-based tribes. Most celebrated—and lampooned—were the Valley girls who congregated in California's Glendale Galleria. Frank Zappa's then-teenage daughter, Moon Unit, wrote a hit song that captured their argot (“ohmigod!”, “no biggie”, “grody to the max”, “total space cadet”) and praised the Galleria for having “like, all these, like, really great shoe stores”. Mall-oriented films followed, spreading the Valley girls' culture like spores in the wind.

Just as the onward march of malls began to seem unstoppable, though, things began to go wrong. In just a few years they turned from temples of consumption to receptacles for social problems. The changing attitude to shopping malls can be seen in two films, both of which, appropriately, are to cinema what Panda Express is to the Chinese culinary tradition.

There are a few zombies at the mall when the refugees arrive, staggering about aimlessly in a fashion familiar to Christmas shoppers. As one character explains, the monsters seem to have been drawn there by instinct: the mall was clearly an important place in their lives. Most of the humans are similarly intoxicated by the variety of goods on display. That worries the film's heroine, Fran. “I'm afraid,” she says. “You're hypnotised by this place, all of you. It's all so bright and neatly wrapped that you don't see that it can be a prison.” Nonsense, replies her boyfriend: “We got everything we need right here!” The rest of the film bears out the horror-movie dictum that nervous young women are always right.

In 1995 a much gloomier vision of the shopping mall appeared. If “Dawn of the Dead” suggested malls were monstrously appealing, Kevin Smith's “Mallrats” depicted them simply as magnets for dysfunctional youth. The film chronicles the mundane adventures of four young men who come to a New Jersey mall to hang out, complain about their girlfriends and annoy security guards. The shopkeepers loathe them because, as the manager of Fashionable Male, a clothes shop, puts it, they lack a “shopping agenda”. Indeed, they lack much of an agenda at all. In Mr Smith's mall everybody is a kind of zombie. As the film's tagline explained: “They're not there to work. They're not there to shop. They're just there.”

So many malls have died or are dying that a new hobby has appeared: amateur shopping-mall history. Like many esoteric pursuits, this has been facilitated by the internet. Websites such as Deadmalls.com and Labelscar.com collect pictures of weedy car parks and empty food courts and try to explain how once-thriving shopping centres began to spiral downward. Some of the recollections are faintly ironic or gloating. Yet the strongest note is anguish. Implausibly, these online histories reveal the deep emotional connections that people can establish with malls.

One of the most touching is a website devoted to Lakehurst mall near Chicago, which was demolished in 2004. Prodded by a local journalist, women and a few men write in with memories of back-to-school shopping trips, ear piercings, first jobs at Cinnabon and Orange Julius, early dates and even marriage proposals. Many are bereft at the mall's demolition, as though suffering the death of a pet. “You don't realise how much you miss something until it is gone,” writes one. Others are almost apologetic: “If only we knew what we had, we would never have strayed to other malls.”

As shopping malls decline, they sometimes come to resemble the civic centres that Gruen intended them to be. Attracted by cheap rents, community groups and police stations move in. On a trip to one of Gruen's creations, the now-desolate Carousel Mall in San Bernardino, your correspondent encountered a group of middle-aged Mexicans studying for the American citizenship test.

Not all malls have suffered from competition and the suburbs' transformation. Some have prospered by appealing to growing ethnic-minority groups. American malls are courting middle-class Latinos by adding butchers' shops and, in some cases, by decking themselves out to resemble Mexican villages. La Gran Plaza, in the Texas town of Fort Worth, lays on mariachi and reggaeton acts and is building a rodeo. Other malls changed their clientele without adjusting their look. Brent Cross shopping centre, one of Britain's earliest malls, now contains shops staffed by second- and third-generation Asians selling to new arrivals from eastern Europe.

The mall goes downtown

Yet without white, middle-aged women few British or American shopping centres could survive. One bold attempt to lure them back can be seen at the corner of Third Street and Fairfax Boulevard in Los Angeles. The Grove shopping centre, which opened in 2002, performs all the functions of a mall without looking at all like one. Like Southdale, it has fountains, flowers, piped music and a good selection of underwear. But the Grove is open to the elements, the plants are real and, rather than vaguely evoking a town centre, it is actually done up to look like one. Or rather (this being Los Angeles) a fantasy amalgam of several town centres.

But there are critical differences between malls and streets. Malls are built ready-made; streets develop over time. In malls, there are prominently displayed directories of shops, numbered and color-coded; on the most intriguing city streets, there are unexpected booksellers and coffee shops to discover.

Of course, real city streets are sometimes dirty or dangerous, and parking is often difficult to find. Those qualities aren't very hip. Or fun. So the architecture of consumption offers a compromise: Make malls look more like old-fashioned downtown streets. Except that they're clean and well-lighted. Even on the outside.

"Part of a mall's face lift has to do with: Can you create the sense of the street?" said California architect Barry Elbasani, who has designed several malls and is an advocate of the street look. "The most successful renovation feels like, if you lifted the roof off the mall, you'd be okay. The floor is substantial, like stone or tile, not carpet. The shop fronts don't look like they'd wither with the first drop of rain. The lighting creates the [same] texture and scale as the sun creates on the street. If it feels like the outdoors but it's weather-protected, that's a home run."

Tysons II opened in 1988, on the trailing cusp of the go-go decade. The two-story portals leading into Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue looked more imposing than welcoming. Outside walls towered like high brick ramparts. There were few external clues that inside were stores that might welcome the masses.

Now, eight years later, having survived a retail recession following Washington's real estate bust, Tysons II has turned itself inside out -- trying to look a little less insular, a little more inviting to people of different economic levels. The goal: to look more like a row of old-time downtown shops with wares in the windows.

Starting last year, the mall's owners began ripping off the pre-cast concrete facades around the mall entrances and erecting ones that looked like row house storefronts, complete with wood and windows, planters, striped awnings and swan-necked, wrought-iron light fixtures.

"We decided to transform the front into a European town house theme," said Daniel Foy, a leasing executive with General Growth Properties Inc., which owns and operates Tysons II. "It's less sterile. We've borrowed these elements from the downtowns themselves." The interior has also changed -- espresso carts and cafe seating in commons areas. "Like you're walking down a street in Georgetown," Foy said.

Of course, no one lives in these row houses. They are facades. And if they are perceived as less sterile, it is in the way that a boardroom is less sterile than an operating room.

The first indoor suburban malls were, by today's standards, architectural disasters at worst, bland at best. They were long, one-story boxes with cubicles inside, like pens in a barn. Flat glass storefronts. Fluorescent lighting. The promise was all-weather shopping, free, plentiful parking and enough sustenance to keep shoppers on their feet.

"In the earlier days of shopping center development, the prevailing attitude was to create a street in an internal environment. It was more or less a 'captured street,' " said Gary Bowden, a vice president of RTKL.

As malls boomed in the '70s and '80s, they grew to two stories or more. Instead of one corridor down the middle, multilevel malls had an open space with concourses heading in all directions. Skylights were punched through the ceiling to let in natural light. Sometimes, large-scale artworks were installed. Each mall seemed to have a common area somewhere near the center, with banks of green plantings and a fountain to soothe stressed-out shoppers. And, more important, to keep them from leaving.

These malls looked like other well-traveled, high-end public spaces -- contemporary museums or performing arts centers, for example.

"In the 1980s, it became acceptable to have higher ambitions in mall construction," Bowden said. "Each mall tried to outdo the last one."

"We tend to think of [malls] as being less important because their architectural and social aspirations seem less important than the great buildings of the 18th and 19th centuries," said David De Long, a University of Pennsylvania professor of architecture. (Penn's architecture school has an emphasis on the suburbs.) "Like everything we preserve, [malls] have elements that speak of our own history. There is something there that embodies some sort of cultural identity. They are too large and too ingrained to simply wash out of existence."

But what to preserve? If malls are constantly morphing to accommodate customers' desires, one can look radically different today than it did even 10 years ago. Moreover, preserving a building means freezing it in time, which means a mall owner would get the tough task of trying to attract customers to a worn-out looking building. It would be like trying to sell a house with an outdated, avocado-colored kitchen.

Another question is: Why preserve? Some planners and architects say we'll never again see the likes of the opulent, marble-and-glass suburban shopping malls such as Tysons II, Pentagon City and Montgomery Mall. Indeed, they may be an endangered species, stalked by direct-mail consumerism, home shopping via the Internet and the designs of New Urbanism -- brand-new suburbs that look like old-time city streets. We expect mall looks to change, but have we thought that malls themselves might disappear?