Park and Ride?

Designing a shopping center in a city presents an obvious problem: how do you program a space surrounded by such a dynamic context? From one year to the next, major programmatic shifts are liable to take place, and predicting the growth of a shopping center becomes difficult when the only way to grow, apart from purchasing surrounding stores, is to expand upward.
Building outside the city, although it affords entirely new opportunities for urban mimicry, is necessarily a more ambitious endeavor. As we leave the city, we escape the infrastructural web that ensnares development and controls expansion. But by going “off the grid,” shopping centers take on a new responsibility: to mimic the urban environment from which they have been ripped, and to facilitate the construction of a new infrastructure of their own - automatons in their own right. But to function, shopping centers must contain more than just an empty shell of infrastructure. They need “stores.” However, in the proposed designs for the Park and Shop, “stores” becomes a generic label for a highly specific block of program, and in some of the schemes, the actual program takes a back seat to the gas station, which seems to act as both the center and the focus of the scheme.
So what happens when this type of scheme is employed within the city? Does the infrastructure (gas station, parking, etc.) then become subservient to the clear programmatic requirements of the shopping center, or does it become completely redundant (and thus entirely unnecessary) within the context of a city rich in infrastructure? Is the Park and Shop described by Longstreth an example of urban mimicry taking place within an infrastructural shell (layout and needs, such as gasoline, which will dictate use), or is this simply a new breed of city operating under the guise of a shopping center?
Basically what I’m getting at here is: Has the mall as a type earned the right to call itself a privately-owned and operated city, - in other words, can the word "city" be reduced to no more than “grouping complementary services in an ensemble? (Longstreth 152)”