The Enclosed Mall Map is an interactive map showing the location of current and past indoor shopping malls in the United States and its territories. This map does not include strip malls, outdoor malls, or lifestyle centers, unless they also have an indoor portion.
Definitions Used for the Map
While some structures are obviously enclosed malls, some were a little more ambiguous. When deciding whether or not to include a mall on the map, I used the following definition:
An enclosed mall is a named structure with space for at least three non-foodservice retail businesses (whether or not occupied), all connected by an indoor, pedestrian-only common area. (An enclosed mall may also contain foodservice businesses.)
Establishments whose primary purpose is transportation and access to the mall portion requires a ticket (e.g. airports, some train stations) are not considered to be enclosed malls.
Hypermarkets, department stores, and other large stores that contain smaller shops within them are not by themselves considered to be enclosed malls. (However, these large stores could be considered to be an anchor to a mall if the small shop hallway has its own entrance, and the small shop hallway can be closed off to separate it from the large anchor store.)
My map also makes a distinction between traditional malls (shown as large dots on the map) and non-traditional malls (shown as small dots on the map), defined as follows:
A traditional mall has an atrium (such as a wide hallway or court large enough to contain kiosks, whether or not kiosks are actually present) as its common area, connected indoors to at least one anchor space and multiple non-anchor spaces.
A non-traditional mall is any other enclosed mall (for example, hallway malls, arcades, enclosed power centers, enclosed strip malls with narrow hallways).
Mall Data
My data used to build the map is available in GeoJSON and CSV:
Technical Details
I store my mall locations and metadata in a GeoPackage file. I use a Python script I wrote to export the data to GeoJSON, which I use with the Mapbox GL JS API to create the interactive map.