Urban Assault: America's golden age of shopping dies in a car park

Earlier this month, Slate published photographs of empty, decaying shopping malls from a new book, Black Friday.

The images are arresting, and the timing couldn't be better. Abandoned malls are hot: the Dead Malls Enthusiasts Facebook group boasts almost 14 000 members; a Google search of "dead malls" produces 5.7 million results.

The images point to some fundamental changes in the retailing experience, though urbanists who hope that failing malls will aid downtown revitalisation may be disappointed. The reality, as one might expect, is more complex.

Here are a few things to consider:

A dying breed

What some writers used to call the "malling" of America is done. Try to find anyone breaking ground for a new regional shopping mall, those hulking structures with 100-plus stores surrounded by vast asphalt parking lots. Since 1990, building has tailed off, and 2007 was the first year in more than four decades when no large malls opened in the US. Only one has opened since then, in 2012.

Bad news for city centres

Advocates of what is sometimes called "new urbanism" suggest the demise of malls will plant the seeds of an urban renaissance.

There's just one catch: malls that are failing tend to be in areas where the entire local economy is in the dumps, making it hard to see how urban retailing would benefit.

In fact, some of the defunct malls are in the centre of cities that adopted the suburban shopping-mall model in a futile effort to bring people downtown.

Buying online

This one is pretty obvious. The web is doing to malls what malls did to downtowns. Anything JC Penney - a classic anchor store for many big malls - can sell, Amazon.com seems to be able to offer for less.

Demographics

Young adults just aren't into malls, marking a significant break from the past. Yes, millennials are more inclined to shop online, though there's more to it. Young adults seem to lack the gene that predisposed earlier generations to go out and buy cars as soon as they had the wherewithal to do so. If there's one thing a mall needs, since they are constructs of the suburbs, it's people who drive.

The sense of community that teens and young adults once found by socialising at malls has also been displaced, in part by social media. This, along with online shopping and carelessness, helps explain why foot traffic in all stores has declined so much.