Death of the Shopping Mall (in the west)

I read this fun wee article recently about shopping malls.

Hong Kong is shopping obsessed, and while it super bores me to be in those malls, it is an interesting comment on the society here in Hong Kong. It says so much about a country being thrust in to the future with not thought, process, or development of it's own ideas, but that's for another time.

In the article Emily Badger talks about Victor Gruen's ideas, in short, the gestation of the mega destination shopping mall as we know it today. 

In the early 50's the shopping malls of today didn't exist. It didn't need to, people still shopped and worked local. Yes, there where department stores and shopping promenades like in Europe but as we know the boom years of the 60's and 70's drove development for new urban forms and the US cities really exploded.

Suburbia was not that new in the middle of the century but already architects including Gruen where bemoaning the displacement of peoples sense of place. While others sited development and regeneration in the cities, similar to the goals of today's architects, Gruen and others of his ilk offered the mall as a new centre of the community. They could not have realised that these places would just be beacons of conspicuous consumption rather than the community hub replica of a cities heart and centre.

In hindsight it seems naive of them to hope that business would take responsibility for a communities development rather than just facilitating easier shopping. It is no wonder that by the end of his efforts in the USA he bitterly lamented that Americans had debased his ideas.

In my mind the suburb is so synonymous with American cities it's difficult to imagin the desertion of the suburbs that the current figures are sighting. In essence he is the father of the truest ideals of the 'mixed use' development, the simultaneous war cry and death rattle of developers.

What I wonder as the East simply replicates the West in spite of the pitfalls is how long before we see ghost towns in China that where once populated but have since been abandoned like in some sci-fi realisation. The idea of a ghost town system or hierarchy interests me. Is that to weird?