The obituaries are being written for what has been an intrinsic part of American culture for half a century, as the country's ubiquitous shopping malls face a slow, painful death.

As shopping and driving habits change, retailers are facing difficult times, and some have estimated that over the next 15 years half of America's malls will die.

The shopping mall was born into a world where people were moving out of the cities and into a new, rich, indulgent life.

Amy Ginsberg's teenage years centred around White Flint Mall in Maryland.

"There were glass elevators and marble and high-end stores," she said.

"When I was in high school in the 70s and 80s there was nowhere else to go, really.

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"The mall was where the stores were, it's where the movie theatres were.

"You would just go to the mall and hang out."

But White Flint's doors closed this month.

Like so many malls in America it had been 'dead' for a while - the term used when a mall's occupancy rate falls below 70 per cent and it is on a downward spiral.

Mark Hinshaw, an architect, city planner and author, has been watching the decline.

"It's a major phenomenon that's lasted for six decades and I think people assumed it would just go on forever," he said.

"The shopping centre was kind of the attack vehicle that went out into the landscape and put down a solid footing and then things grew up around it.

"But that course is changing now; the people are now looking at other ways of living.

"Certainly living in cities is much more popular than it has been in a long time. Millennials are fuelling the economy like never before and they're not interested in driving."

At the peak of the shopping centre boom, 140 malls were being built every year in America.

If their fate had not already been sealed, the recent recession marked the beginning of the end.

People stopped spending as much, or started spending online, and then discovered they didn't need as much.

Executive director of the Shopping Centre Council of Australia Angus Nardi said Australia was a long way off the situation in the US.

But he predicted hurdles ahead for Australia's shopping centres.

"You can never say never in terms of dead malls and there's always business risks ... a critical and current risk is the Abbott Government's review of competition policy, which could lead to a less regulated or free-for-all cowboy approach to retail land use planning," Mr Nardi said.

He said America had more retail floor space per capita than any other country in the world, and oversupply had been the biggest problem.

In America there are dozens of simply abandoned malls, only good to be used as sets for horror movies.

Others are trying to change tack before it's too late, incorporating libraries and housing, even city halls, to encourage their survival.