  The social inclusion aspects of shopping malls and their effects on our
understanding of urban spaces have been a controversial argument largely
discussed in the literature. Shopping malls offer an open, safe and democratic
version of the public space. Many of their detractors suggest that malls target
their customers in subtle ways, promoting social exclusion. In this work, we
analyze whether malls offer opportunities for social mixing by analyzing the
patterns of shopping mall visits in a large Latin-American city: Santiago de
Chile.
  We use a large XDR (Data Detail Records) dataset from a telecommunication
company to analyze the mobility of $387,152$ cell phones around $16$ large
malls in Santiago de Chile during one month. We model the influx of people to
malls in terms of a gravity model of mobility, and we are able to predict the
customer profile distribution of each mall, explaining it in terms of mall
location, the population distribution, and mall size.
  Then, we analyze the concept of social attraction, expressed as people from
low and middle classes being attracted by malls that target high-income
customers. We include a social attraction factor in our model and find that it
is negligible in the process of choosing a mall. We observe that social mixing
arises only in peripheral malls located farthest from the city center, which
both low and middle class people visit. Using a co-visitation model we show
that people tend to choose a restricted profile of malls according to their
socio-economic status and their distance from the mall. We conclude that the
potential for social mixing in malls could be capitalized by designing public
policies regarding transportation and mobility.
