World Waterpark is one of the many super-sized attractions in my local shopping centre – which happens to be the largest mall in North America, and was once the biggest in the world.

Recently, I have questioned whether time spent at West Edmonton Mall is time well spent. Only a five minute drive from my home in the Alberta capital, and with a car park that can accommodate 20,000 vehicles, I used to be embarrassed that my hometown’s reputation could depend so heavily on it. I sniffed at the culture of consumerism it represented – and what it took away from the character of the community. ... Thirty years ago, it drew roughly 20 million people a year, about twice the number who visited Disneyland, California. Today, its 800 shops draw 30 million visitors a year, and it sees almost 10 times the traffic of Banff – Alberta’s most popular Rocky Mountain park – making it the province’s top attraction. But then, wilderness isn’t our natural habitat anyway ... thanks to climate control and myriad spectacles for our shortened attention spans, maybe the mall (and West Edmonton Mall in particular) still is.

...

Generally, malls struggle to make the transition in two significant ways. Firstly, shopping doesn’t promote unity; it’s a form of personal fulfilment that requires no collaboration other than with a sales clerk (or, when online, no one). By nature, the mall cuts us off from one another by encouraging the individual pursuit of stuff.

Secondly, enclosed malls cut us off from the world. Or in the case of West Edmonton Mall, it can seem to become that world (its owner, TripleFive, calls it an entertainment and retail “city”). I would even argue that it undermines placemaking efforts beyond the 48 city blocks it occupies.

When it first opened at a mere 1.1m sq ft, “the new mall was just considered another suburban shopping centre”, according to a 1987 report by the city of Edmonton in response to public concern over the mall and “its impacts”.

That naivety was remedied by – among other ill effects – an 8% economic decline in the downtown core, only now recovering thanks to a recently built National Hockey League arena. A mall actually opened downtown in 1987 in answer to West Edmonton Mall, with the hope it would pull people back to the core.

Today, revitalisation efforts tacitly focus on drawing people away from both malls, and on encouraging the proliferation of street level, independent cafes and businesses that “inject the gaiety, the wonder, the cheerful hurly-burly that make people want to come into the city and to linger there”, as Jane Jacobs once wrote