‘Those bastard developments’ – why the inventor of the shopping mall denounced his creation

The world’s first indoor mall was meant to usher in a utopian dream. But its creator, an Austrian who had fled the Nazis, came to believe a nightmare had been unleashed that ‘destroyed our cities’‘Every day will be a perfect shopping day,” cooed the adverts for America’s first indoor mall when it opened in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956. Edina is blanketed by snow and ice in winter, and baked by unbearably humid heat in summer. The Southdale Center offered the blis