Today, the largest malls are in very different parts of the world. The biggest of all is the New South China Mall, Dongguan, covering a floor area twenty times that of St Peter’s in Rome, and well over twice of the King of Prussia Mall in Pennsylvania, the biggest in the US. Among the top ten largest malls in the world are two, perhaps surprisingly, in Iran, while even Bangladesh with a GDP per capita of $1,851 boasts a new mall far bigger than Pennsylvania’s “King of Prussia” (the same figure for the US is $51,749 according to the World Bank).

Shop horror

The world has gone on a gigantic spending spree, and yet as the experience of America’s ‘ghost malls’ shows, fashions do indeed come and go. Soon enough, and just as no one knows how to make use of Ancient Egyptian temples today, shopping malls will become the stuff of archaeology and folklore. A place for the living dead, too, perhaps, although the mall George Romero chose to film Dawn of the Dead in - the Monroeville Mall, near Pittsburgh, opened in 1969 − is doing well. It was expanded and renovated in 2013-14, yet still revels in the roles it has played not just in Dawn of the Dead, but in the 1983 movie Flashdance, too, as well as in 1984’s The Boy Who Loved Trolls and in Steven King’s horror novel, Christine.

As a building type, and social and economic phenomenon, the shopping mall has a way to go, and yet it has already spawned its own wrecks and ruins. These tell us more than enough about the ways we have chosen to spend and live over the past half-century. Looking at photographs of abandoned malls, those ways can certainly be unsettling, and even just a little horrifying.

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