The American landscape is littered with hundreds of dead shopping malls. In places like the vast Rolling Acres Mall in Akron, Ohio, which has stood empty since 2008, the indoor fountains have stopped running, but the prosthetic plants inside remain eerily green. More will join them — 15 percent of American malls will close in the next ten years.

The biggest shopping mall in the world, the New South China Mall in Dongguan, is also a dead mall. Opening in 2005, it boasted seven zones, each based on major international cities and featuring including a replica Arc de Triomphe and a Venetian canal complete with gondolas. However, the mall has remained 99 percent vacant since its opening. Aside from a cluster of fast food restaurants near its entrance, it’s nothing more than a network of vast atria, mothballed cinemas and roller coasters.

Unable to compete with online shopping, declining consumer affluence, rising oil prices, and a volatile property market, shopping malls are dropping like flies. The CEO of a major shopping mall building company recently warned that “within ten to fifteen years” the shopping mall “will be a historical anachronism — a sixty-year aberration that no longer meets the public’s needs.”