In this week’s Friday Know-It-All, Editor Andrea weighs in on a place Filipino and Minnesotan cultures meet: the mall.

The rare instances of people speaking Tagalog to each other in Minnesota that I encounter often are at the Mall of America. The Mall feels familiar to me in that way. While it is the biggest tourist destination in the state, there’s something to be said about the enduring appeal of malls distinctly in Minnesota and in the Philippines. The Mall of Asia, located in Bay City, Pasay, Philippines is the sixth largest in the world (for context, the Mall of America doesn’t even make the Top 10 list of the world’s largest malls). That mall has an indoor ice skating rink and quick access to the biggest IKEA in the world. It might seem surprising to see the success of malls in 2025, given the rise of online shopping, economic uncertainty, and the strange internet phenomenon of romanticizing dead malls, but, in both Minnesota and the Philippines, malls have held — and in many ways, continue to hold — a unique cultural, economic, and social significance.

Victor Gruen, a Jewish refugee who had fled Nazi-occupied Austria in 1938, is credited with conceptualizing the mall that we know today. He was labeled the “Father of the Shopping Mall,” but he eventually came to despise this title. In 1978, two years before his death, he said, “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.” Gruen envisioned the mall as a sustainable, walkable public space, instead of a car-centric beacon of consumerism. Gruen’s vision lives on in the Philippines where malls serve as more than mere retail hubs — they are public commons that offer safety, stability, and predictability amid harsh external environments. The mall culture in these two places shares intriguing parallels shaped by community needs and consumer behavior while also reflecting deeper histories of consumerism and globalization.

In Minnesota, the mall boom of the late 20th century mirrored postwar economic prosperity and suburban expansion. Similarly, right before the EDSA Revolution in 1986, an event that would depose President Ferdinand Marcos, Filipino businessman Henry Sy opened his first mall: a “supermall” called SM City North EDSA. Soon, foreign investors saw the political instability happening in the Philippines as an opportunity to capitalize on cheap real estate and investment in development opportunities. The result is a whopping 850 malls in the Philippines, and their ubiquity shaped urban infrastructure in the country.

Malls in the Philippines offer shelter, connection, and identity in ways that go beyond retail. It’s not uncommon for people in the Philippines to take their dogs on walks in an air-conditioned mall or to see people getting their passports renewed at a municipal office located inside the mall. In addition to restaurants and retail stores, malls in the Philippines are likely to include small amusement parks, ice skating rinks, government and utilities offices, daycare centers, medical and dental offices, and churches. Here in the U.S., in an era of the vanishing “third space,” malls still remain spaces for people to gather. The CDC officially encourages mall walking as a weather-immune physical activity. An estimated 32 million people visit the Mall of America each year, many of whom use the space in a similar way. Up until 2022, you could get married in the Mall of America. Up until COVID shutdowns, you could visit the DMV. You can still get a tattoo there. However, I’m still waiting for a Muji, a Uniqlo, and especially a JOLLIBEE in the Mall of America.