It is difficult to single out one type of popular landscape, just as it is difficult to distinguish one type of folk landscape. Popular culture has been, nonetheless, commonly associated with mass-produced suburban housing, commercial strips, and large indoor shopping malls. These latter retail districts have come to be known by geographer Robert Sack’s term, “landscapes of consumption” (refer back to Figure 2.8). Not only are such landscape features common in North America, they are now also seen in Brazil, China, India, and many other countries with rapidly growing economies increasingly linked through globalization (Figure 2.51). Indeed, the world’s ten largest (in terms of leasable area) indoor shopping malls may all be found outside of North America.

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Of these, North America’s largest indoor mall is West Edmonton Mall in the Canadian province of Alberta (Figure 2.52). Enclosing some 5.3 million square feet (493,000 square meters) and opened in 1986, West Edmonton Mall employs 23,500 people in more than 800 stores and services, accounts for nearly one-fourth of the total retail space in greater Edmonton, earned 42 percent of the dollars spent in local shopping centers, and experienced 2800 crimes in its first nine months of operation. Beyond its sheer size, West Edmonton Mall also boasts a water park, a sea aquarium, an ice-skating rink, a miniature golf course, a roller coaster, 21 movie theaters, and a 360-room hotel. Its “streets” feature motifs from such distant places as New Orleans, represented by a Bourbon Street complete with fiberglass ladies of the evening. Jeffrey Hopkins, a geographer who studied this mall, refers to this as a “landscape of myth and elsewhereness,” a “simulated landscape” that reveals the “growing intrusion of spectacle, fantasy, and escapism into the urban landscape.”