https://jacobin.com/2014/04/the-last-shopping-mall

US/Austria:

His plans were for large state-owned indoor agoras that would literally contain the market forces that were running rampant outside their walls. It was a modernist vision for the refounding of American public life. Many of the malls built by Gruen and his company in the 1950s retained elements of this promise, with his Southdale Mall in Edina, Minn., planned around an enormous common meeting place modeled on a European piazza.

By the 1960s, Gruen was horrified by his creations. The shopping mall, along with the freeway and the cheap federally backed mortgage, had become part of the architecture of suburban white supremacy. Gruen returned to Austria in 1968 and furiously worked on a project to pedestrianize Vienna.

Two years before his death in 1980, he stated, “I am often called the father of the shopping mall. I would like to take this opportunity to disclaim paternity once and for all. I refuse to pay alimony to those bastard developments. They destroyed our cities.”

UK:

In Britain, the progressive pre-history of the shopping mall has an even longer and stranger history. When the anarchist planner Ebenezer Howard outlined his utopian vision for British “garden cities” in 1898, he looked to create in each settlement a “crystal palace” which would combine the functions of London shopping arcades and indoor winter pleasure gardens entirely under one roof. While the structure would be financed and built by the local municipal authority, individual traders would be allowed to practice freely, though their number would be “limited by the principle of public opinion.”

It took the intervention of the Luftwaffe for something like this vision to be realized in Britain. Coventry, a small city in the Midlands of England, is an unlikely site for what might arguably be the first shopping mall-like structure in the world. The total destruction of the city during the war wiped out the dense, packed medieval shopping streets that had characterized its pre–World War II history. With the help of the British government, the city’s head architect Donald Gibson was able to use new emergency legislation to effectively nationalize the center of Coventry, bringing almost 500 acres of land under the total power of the local authority.

There, he built a holistically planned, partly enclosed multi-story shopping center — arguably the first of its kind in the world. While the city owned the land, provided the frame, the concrete steps, the bridges, the car parks, and the greenery, the tenants provided the temperature control, the music, and the lighting. The doors were never locked.

Though the GUM in the SU did in my eyes resemble shopping malls a while before, too:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GUM_(department_store)