Malls were an urban concept to begin with. There are many old examples in places like Milan, Paris, London where developers built arcades over an alleyway and voilà. I'm not saying it is the best solution for Detroit because for one thing transit options would need to be added for this to work. Transit options that would be favored over automotive displacement by suburban residents. You could always make it work with multistorey parking and do away with surface lots as much as possible.
Malls work in Toronto and Montreal where they connect with office buildings, condo towers and metro or subway stations. There are at least a dozen major malls that start underground in Montreal, and the street retail downtown is not affected by this as much as you would think. I hate the repetitiveness of the offer in many of these places but they are convenient, well lit, conditioned and heated, and patrolled. I like street retail better, but here, with the weather in january and february upon us, malls make sense for a lot of people especially the elderly, the handicapped, buskers, the homeless and so on...
Also, there are different kinds of malls with low to high-end offer. I can walk from my place to Alexis Nihon Plaza or move on to Westmount Square's boutiques where the shops are more exclusive and where they specialize in medical clinics, etc... They are connected via the metro access tunnels. In the central part of downtown, the other malls are also connected via the RESO or PATH as they call it in Toronto. There are some metro stations like McGill and Peel that have underground connections to 3 or 4 malls in a row, and these are mostly found at the base of office buildings and even museums and concert halls.
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