A shopping mall is a building or set of buildings that contain stores/shops and have interconnecting walkways that make it easy for people to walk from store to store. The walkways may or may not be enclosed. In the United Kingdom and Australia these are called "shopping centres" or "shopping arcades".
A strip mall is a type of shopping mall where the stores are arranged in a row, with a sidewalk in front. Strip malls are typically developed as a unit and have large parking lots in front. In the United Kingdom these are called "retail parks" or "out of town shopping centres", even though they might not be out of town.
In the late 20th century, with the rise of the suburb and automobile culture in the United States, a new form of mall was created away from city centers. The design is modeled after small town main streets in the USA, but placed entirely indoors. This new generation of mall was pioneered by Southdale, located in the Twin Cities suburb of Edina, Minnesota.
Mall can refer to a shopping mall, which is a place where a collection of shops all adjoin a pedestrian area, or an exclusively pedestrian street, that allows shoppers to walk without interference from vehicle traffic. Mall is generally used in North America and Australasia to refer to large shopping areas, while the term arcade is more often used, especially in Britain, to refer to a narrow pedestrian-only street, often covered or between closely spaced buildings. A larger, often only partly covered but exclusively pedestrian shopping area is in Britain also termed a shopping precinct or pedestrian precinct.
