Sounds like most of the malls, suburban and otherwise, around Atlanta.
I grew up in rural towns (pop. < 2500) and small cities (pop. ~20,000 to ~50,000) in Arkansas. The first time I really felt like “hey, this is what life’s supposed to be like” was when I hopped out of a cab from Logan Airport in Cambridge, Mass. at 11:30 on a summer Saturday night and found people out wandering around, going in and out of bookstores and listening to street musicians, etc. Would I feel the same now? Probably not, now that I’ve lived and worked in a city and in the suburbs for years.
I do think that cities have the advantage of allowing you to be as connected to a community or as anonymous as you want to be (may take a bit more effort to establish community connections in the city, but they’re there if you want 'em). In a small town, you have no choice – everyone knows everyone else and what they’re doing. I do think, though, that once you establish a way of living (i.e., either connected or anonymous) in one location, it’s awfully hard to change that without relocating; it’s my opinion that one of the reasons people find new places so much more accommodating and community-oriented than the place they left is that the person has changed their approach and expectations, and has left behind the “anonymous” way of dealing with their neighbors that they’d cultivated before. The situational nature of much of human behavior has been pretty well established, and I think a lot of people move to cities and develop habits that leave them unconnected with the community around them, preferring the anonymity that the city affords. Later, when they’re ready to connect with people around them, they’re so used to not dealing with their neighbors where they are that they end up needing to move to new surroundings with new neighbors in order to be able to function differently.
Certainly in my own case, I can say that I got to know very few of my neighbors in the eight years or so I lived in apartments inside the city of Atlanta, despite living in old, well-established neighborhoods with thriving community lives. During my ten years in the suburbs, however, I’ve been very much involved in community and neighborhood life – with neighbors who, in many cases, lived in the same sorts of places I did before and who also didn’t know their neighbors then.
There are times when I miss the sort of idyllic childhood I had in small towns in Arkansas – playing baseball in our yard with kids from all over town with nary a grownup in sight for hours at a time, riding bikes all over and around town, including circling town on top of the levee, grabbing a tackle box and rod and reel and going fishing in the river just on the other side of the levee from our hose, “sledding” down the levee banks (the only elevated ground for a hundred miles) on the sides of old appliance cartons – on snow when there was any (rarely) or dried grass when there wasn’t, riding my bike to the library and spending hours there, checking out two big bags full of books each time, etc. The only time I can think of that adults involved themselves in our activities at all was organized Little League baseball, and I honestly don’t think that every LL practice and game I ever had would add up to 2% of the total amount of time I spent playing baseball as a kid. I would love for my son, now seven, to be able to do things like that, but even if I lived in a town like the one I grew up in, these days I’d be jailed for child neglect for allowing him to roam like I did. I would love to live someplace where I can walk to the corner store for milk or eggs instead of having to get in the car and drive a couple of miles (even though I live in a densely populated area, it’s impossible to get anywhere without a car). The few places like that in the Atlanta area are outside my price range, even with an income that threatens to break though into six figures.
Also, as a convert to Judaism, I need to live someplace large enough that there is a Jewish community to be part of – ideally, where my kids aren’t necessarily the only Jewish kids in their class, where there’s more than one option for Hebrew school, etc.
