It's A Mall World After All; Critics love to hate shopping centers as symbols of all that is wrong with American culture. But as they go global, they are stimulating economic growth throughout the developing world.(Cover Story)

Byline: Mac Margolis (With Sudip Mazumdar in New Delhi, Sumeet Chatterjee in Mumbai, Quindlen Krovatin in Beijing, Joanna Kowalska-Iszkowska in Warsaw, William Underhill in London and Alexandra Polier in Nairobi)

When the Los Angeles firm Altoon + Porter Architects set out to design a shopping arcade in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, a few years ago, it faced a delicate mission: to raise a glitzy pleasure dome full of Western temptations in the maw of fundamentalist Islam. Not that the Saudis were consumer innocents; King Khalid airport in Riyadh fairly hums with wealthy Arabs bound for the lavish shops of Paris and London. But the trick was to lure women buyers--the ...