I find that as I've read more about design, and done things like play city builders, I have come to a greater appreciation for good design, and specifically well designed traffic flow - both of cars and humans.

Malls have to follow a delicate balance: Move traffic too well, and no one will enter the shops; move traffic too poorly, and no one will enter the mall in the first place. As soon as you step into a mall and look at the map, you can see how that mall is trying to balance traffic. One mall that immediately comes to mind as a TERRIBLE mall is the St. Laurent mall in Ottawa, ON. It's vaguely triangular, and as a result there is no straight way yo get from one side of the mall to the other - meaning that walking through the mall to get to its attached bus station is a huge pain, and going from one "flagship" store to another (the flagships are on the corners of the triangle) is the longest possible walk.

Another mall in Ottawa that does traffic relatively well (though admittedly not perfectly) is the Rideau Center, which is downtown. It's a multi-floor, taller-than-it-is-wide kind of mall, and even through there are no "direct" paths to get anywhere, no walking distances feel too time-wasting, and there are multiple paths to get just about everywhere (including out the other side of the building). It's a much nicer mall to be in.

So yeah... malls. an interesting social experiment.