I enjoyed watching that video.
It's strange. Not sure about the US, but I figure that when malls like this opened in the 80's, small, center town located shops got closed because of this...so now this cycle starts again.
I do have to say that judging on your 91 and recent video stuff, they never renovated the place since it was built. That is a MAJOR fault to make. You have to keep updating and innovating to keep places like that attractive.
No offense but it's a bit of a US thing. Build something and then think it'll last forever. I remember landing at JFK in 1998, first US visit in my life, and when we entered the terminal building we thought we were warped back to the 50's, expecting to bump into Gene Kelly who just left the Lockheed Constellation at gate 2....(it's much improved now though, the Dutch Schiphol design signing is a major improvement too
).
The mall in Nashua where I bought my iPad last summer had exactly the same floor, which gave it a real retro look, but it made it pretty old-fashioned. They were replacing it now though...
Most malls we visited (quite a few...my wife loves shopping...) looked to be in better shape still, but I'm sure economy and internet shopping is hitting hard there as well.
Over here we have similar problems with shops closing because of internet sales. Because we have a small and densely populated country, shops were always "around the corner" and doing great. Not many people bought through mail-order. Internet shopping changed that seriously...
And we all participate.
I don't really "feel" anything about malls, because over here thew were never like in the US. Cinema's were in city centers in the 80's here. Now, they are in separate huge buildings, like the mega-cinema's you have.
And let's not start about arcades. There were never arcades in malls over here. The square-meter rent was simply way too high to let an arcade survive I guess.
