Eindhoven (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈɛi̯nt.ˌɦoː.və(n)] ( listen)) is a municipality and a city located in the province of North Brabant in the south of the Netherlands, originally at the confluence of the Dommel and Gender streams. The Gender was dammed short of the city centre in the 1950s but the Dommel still runs through the city. The city had 218,559 inhabitants (November 2012) and 261,082 if adjacent Veldhoven is included, making it the fifth-largest city of the Netherlands and the largest of North Brabant.
Neighbouring cities and towns include Son en Breugel, Nuenen, Geldrop-Mierlo, Heeze-Leende, Waalre, Veldhoven, Eersel, Oirschot and Best. The agglomeration has some 440,000 inhabitants. The metropolitan area (which includes Helmond) has nearly 750,000 inhabitants. Also, Eindhoven is part of Brabant Stad, a combined metropolitan area with more than 2 million inhabitants. In 2011, Eindhoven was named world's most intelligent community by Intelligent Community Forum.
A shopping mall, shopping center/centre, shopping arcade, shopping precinct, or simply mall is one or more buildings forming a complex of shops representing merchandisers, with interconnecting walkways enabling visitors to easily walk from unit to unit, along with a parking area – a modern, indoor version of the traditional marketplace.
Modern "car-friendly" strip malls developed from the 1920s, and shopping malls corresponded with the rise of suburban living in many parts of the Western World, especially the United States, after World War II. From early on, the design tended to be inward-facing, with malls following theories of how customers could best be enticed in a controlled environment. Similar, the concept of a mall having one or more "anchor store" or "big box stores" was pioneered early, with individual stores or smaller-scale chain stores intended to benefit from the shoppers attracted by the big stores.