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, indoor, climate-controlled space designed to connect at least three non-foodservice retail businesses. The connecting space must have its own restrooms and/or have shops facing each other across a hallway wide enough for kiosks.
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.)
Judgment may be used for particularly interesting malls which do not fully meet the above definitions.
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 enclosed mall is an enclosed mall with at least one anchor store and at least three non-anchor, non-foodservice shops. It must have both its own restrooms and shops facing each other across a hallway wide enough for kiosks.
A non-traditional enclosed mall is any other enclosed mall that does not meet the traditional criteria (such as arcade shops, enclosed power centers, enclosed strip malls, and some hallway malls).
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.