So many American cities have built malls downtown. If you are a big global city shopping and tourism destination downtown, then yes...malls work. If not, no. The mall will fail or be comprised of crappy stores and eateries struggling to stay open plus a lot of vacancy.

So can Detroit support a downtown mall? Probably not in decades. It could support a large food court with some retail that caters to the office crowd [[like Walgreens, Hallmark, watch repair, barbers and salons), but not the urban traditional mall many would envision.

If detroit wants to increase retail downtown, it will be in the form of stores with street frontage. Not an enclosed shopping center. That's just never going to happen.