INNOVATION TALK:AMAZON'S FOUNDER AND chief executive Jeff Bezos ranks as one of the most ambitious men in the technology business, gleefully disrupting one business after another.

Most obviously, the publishing world has been turned upside down with the rise of e-books, a technological shift that Bezos was instrumental in making possible with the revolutionary Kindle reader.

And that’s not the only old-media business that Bezos is determined to disrupt – the Seattle-based company recently announced that it is creating a digital-media development centre in London, ensuring they will be able to rival the likes of Netflix and Apple’s iTunes store by streaming content to customers.

In a related initiative, back in May, Amazon made tentative steps into the world of content creation with a scheme to solicit film and TV scripts. And with the Kindle Fire tablet, Bezos is even staking out a position as the future of mobile computing takes shape.

But it is distinctly possible that Bezos’ most significant disruption won’t be recorded in mounting quarterly losses posted by a rival retailer or media company. Instead, his legacy might be felt over the long term in the very shape of our cities.

The evolution of retail has seen many significant shifts over the generations, from discrete, specialised shops in urban centres to large department stores to even larger shopping malls and big-box retailers in the suburbs. There are many complex economic and social forces underpinning these transitions, of course, but each phase represented the triumph of successive retailing innovations, and it’s possible to characterise those innovations in one word – convenience.

The rise of the suburban mall began as a US phenomenon, and indeed is synonymous with US urban design, but it was an Austrian architect, Victor Gruen, who is credited with inventing it. In the early 1950s, he outlined his idea for a suburban retail centre in the Progressive Architecture journal, and oversaw the prototypical mall in Edina, Minnesota, in 1956. He gave his name to the so-called Gruen Effect, where consumers become disoriented by the confusing layout of a mall and become literally and figuratively lost in the shopping experience – a convenient metaphor for the narcotic effect of mass consumerism.

In designing the mall, Gruen also created what became one of the United States’ most significant “gifts” to the world – alongside Hollywood movies and pop music, it’s possible to see the mall, and the consumerism it serves, as one of the country’s great cultural exports.

The convenience that the mall and big-box retailers provided was a function of the increased dependence on the automobile – acres of parking space and peripheral locations meant the mall was a hell of a lot easier to negotiate than city-centre shopping for most suburbanites. For such customers, the mall offered not just an easier shopping experience, but came to represent a simulacrum of community.

But the traditional American mall is in trouble – a recent article by The Atlantic’s Emily Badger pointed out that there hasn’t been a new mall opened in the US since 2006, and by some estimates, nearly one-third of US malls are dying, with empty units and dwindling footfall. To cope with the changed demands, many malls are having to drastically repurpose themselves – a mall in Columbus, Ohio, was demolished and replaced by a park, while part of a mall in Cleveland is being converted into a vegetable garden.

Malls and big-box outlets were built to take advantage of the infrastructure of the automobile, but retail is being revolutionised by the infrastructure of the internet, which is where Bezos comes in.

In a widely cited article, Slate’s technology correspondent Farhad Manjoo recently wrote about the implications of Amazon’s surprising u-turn on sales tax in a number of US states. One of Amazon’s prime advantages for US customers was the way it avoided sales tax by merely delivering items from their centralised warehouses in sparsely populated states, allowing Amazon to undercut their brick-and-mortar rivals.

But as Manjoo points out, Amazon is now building warehouses in a number of populous states and agreeing to pay sales taxes. The key advantage this provides is the holy grail of online retail – same-day delivery. Order a book or a gadget in the morning and have it delivered to your door that evening – it’s a game-changing leap in convenience. As Manjoo puts it: “If [Amazon] can pull that off, the company will permanently alter how we shop. To put it more bluntly: Physical retailers will be hosed.” So will the Gruen Effect be replaced by a Bezos effect? The promise of same-day delivery is admittedly specific to the US at the moment, but just as malls and big-box outlets once seemed uniquely American before becoming global, this too shall become internationalised – the inexorable logic of convenience and capitalism will see to that.

And thus our cities will change once again, slowly at first, with some malls being retrofitted and adapted and others being demolished, before some new advance leaves its mark on our urban space. This is the inevitable consequence of ambitious innovation — disruption on a vast scale.